Re: Emacs interface for Guix

[Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com>]

Ludovic Courtès (2014-07-20 18:08 +0400) wrote:

> Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Yes, that's what concerned me since the very beginning – unique entities
>> should have unique identifiers, i.e. ideally there should be an
>> easy-to-get ID for every package.  But as I'm using a non-unique
>> ‘name-version’ spec to "identify" a package, information about installed
>> outputs is displayed for every matching package.
>
> OK.  At the Scheme level, package objects are unique of course; but at
> the UI level, we can’t guarantee that there’s a single package for each
> name/version pair (and this is not even desirable, I think.)

I don't say that name+version should identify a package, but I think it
would be very convenient to have an ID for a package definition.  For
example now manifest may tell that "out" of a "guile-2.0.11" package is
installed but there are 2 "guile-2.0.11" packages out there and it's
impossible to distinguish those.  And vice versa when I list available
packages I want to see my installed outputs only for the right packages,
not for all packages with the same name+version.

What if to make some ‘get-package-by-id’ function that will always
return a single package?  And there is no need to add IDs for all
package definitions, as most of them are identified with name+version
already.  What I suggest is to add an optional “postfix” field to
<package> record, so that a combination “name+version+[postfix]” will be
unique and will be returned by ‘package-id’ like this:

  (package-id #<package guile-2.0.11 gnu/packages/guile.scm>)  ==> "guile-2.0.11"
  (package-id #<package guile-2.0.11 gnu/packages/base.scm>)   ==> "guile-2.0.11_base"

And also to add this ID to the manifest entries.

I believe all this will not break current functionality but it may be
very useful.  What do you think?

>> You may look at:
>>
>>   M-x guix-search-by-name guile-2.0.11
>>
>> to see how it looks like in a “list” and especially “info” buffers
>> currently (I have updated the repo).
>
> Looks good to me!

It doesn't look good to me.  As I said before, installed outputs should
“belong” only to a single package, which can be done only (IMHO) if
there will be a unique ID for a package definition.

>> Also I made some changes for augmenting paths, so please report if
>> something does not work.
>
> I’m still seeing a lot of these at the top of *Guix REPL*:
>
> ;;; note: source file /data/src/guix.el/guix-helper.scm
> ;;;       newer than compiled /home/ludo/.cache/guile/ccache/2.0-LE-8-2.0/data/src/guix.el/guix-helper.scm.go
> ;;; note: auto-compilation is enabled, set GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0
> ;;;       or pass the --no-auto-compile argument to disable.
> ;;; compiling /data/src/guix.el/guix-helper.scm

A lot?  Hm, for me “guix-helper.scm” was the only file that was compiled
as it was changed.  Could you check that “C-h v guix-directory” tells
you the proper directory? (for me it is "/home/alexx/.config/guix/latest"
now)  Also check ‘%load-compiled-path’ in the “*Guix REPL*” buffer, please.

Thanks.