Re: [PATCH] HACKING: Mention 'guix environment'.

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:
>>
>>> Just today I used 'guix environment guix' to quickly create a
>>> development environment for Guix hacking.  I figured it should be
>>> mentioned in the HACKING file to assist developers that happen to
>>> already by using a Guix system.
>>>
>>> WDYT?
>>
>> Sure, please commit!  I thought I had done it, but no.
>>
>>> +If you are building Guix on a system that already runs Guix, you can use 'guix
>>> +environment' to spawn a shell whose environment contains all of the necessary
>>> +packages without installing them to your user profile:
>>> +
>>> +  guix environment guix
>>
>> This is true only when ‘guix’ refers to the development version, which
>> has the autotools etc. as inputs.
>
> Okay, so that's not always the case?  In that case, we could say:
>
>   guix environment -e '(@@ (gnu packages package-management) guix-devel)'

You’re right that it will always work in practice, because there’ll
always be a ‘guix-devel’ more recent than ‘guix’.  So the wording above
is OK.

The problem I was raising does not really apply here; I’m shamelessly
sidetracking, I admit.  ;-)

>> I think it would be nice to have a ‘--install’ option to specify
>> additional packages to add to the environment, so that one could do
>> (say):
>>
>>   guix environment mpc -i autoconf automake libtool
>>
>> and get a really complete development environment.
>>
>> (We discussed this on IRC some time ago, but I think we had overlooked
>> this simple solution.)
>
> I think that is a good idea in general, so I will work on adding it.

OK.

Ludo’.