Re: Replacing Bower with "guix environment"

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:
>
>>  - The "hip new way" of doing things is to use Bower.  Bower is a
>>    package manager, but it's made specifically for static assets served
>>    to the user, such as css files, fonts, javascript like jquery, etc.
>>    Bower also puts these in an extlib/ or whatever, but it puts them in
>>    that place *for* you.
>
> Interesting.
>
> (Thinking out lout.)
>
> Just like ‘guix system vm’ returns a script that runs QEMU with the
> right arguments, one could imagine generating a script that copies
> dependencies in the right place maybe?
>
>   (define (make-installer assets)
>     (gexp->script "copy-assets"
>                   #~(begin
>                       (for-each copy-file '#$@assets)
>                       ...)))
>
> (This could/should be turned into a package object so that adding it as
> an input would drop it in $PATH.)
>
> The developer would have to explicitly run that script to have the files
> copied under extlib/.
>
> Alternately one could generate a script that directly runs some http
> server with the right parameters so that it finds CSS files, JS files,
> etc.
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> Ludo’.

That's a very interesting idea!  (Conveniently, I just gave "guix system
vm" a test yesterday! :))

It makes sense to me, I think.  I'd like to give it a try... I need to
understand gexps better I suppose :)