Re: more package transformations: overrides

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

>> Considering that the transformations API assumes that you understand
>> that higher order functions exist and what to do with them, I think it
>> would be good to offer a slightly less advanced method of overriding
>> packages.
>>
>> Manifests can do anything, but this also makes them rather intimidating
>> for many of my colleagues.
>
> OK; then my question would be: why stop at transformations?  Perhaps we
> could simply have a way to feed arbitrary guix command line arguments
> from a file, e.g.
>
> guix shell --args-file=my-arguments.txt

The transformations command line options are rather verbose:

  --with-input=python-pytorch=python-pytorch-with-extra-features

I think it would improve usability to be able to use the *same* names in
an override file.  Got a package with name “python-pytorch” in that
file?  It replaces “python-pytorch” in the graph.

~~

On the separate topic of reading arguments from elsewhere, though, I
think being able to read arguments from stdin could be useful.  Without
having to add a new option one could then do

    guix shell < my-arguments.txt

-- 
Ricardo