"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> Great article!

Thanks! :)

> I spotted a typo in the first paragraph: "on a same system" should be
> "on the same system."

I can fix it.  Out of curiosity, why is it wrong?  "All users on a
system..."  is correct, "All users on a given system" too, so I wonder
why "on a same system" would not be.  What I meant here is "the same
unspecified system".

> 'guix environment' is a very composable command, and it's not clear to
> me how I would add the stuff I want onto it and it's even less clear
> if it's a good idea.  Probably not.  So, I wonder if maybe a new
> subcommand, say 'guix develop', could address this common development
> use-case while allowing 'guix environment' to continue being the swiss
> army knife that it is.  Some simple naming conventions could make this
> tool "just work."  Running 'guix develop' would check for a profile
> symlink with some canonical name, for example '.guix-develop-profile'.
> If it exists, it applies the environment variables and spawns a
> subshell.  If it doesn't exist, it looks for a 'develop.scm' file
> (canonical name TBD), builds the profile, symlinks it to
> '.guix-develop-profile', and then does the prior steps.  The tool
> would provide a mechanism to update, etc. and it could even be
> expanded later to spawn services like databases.

Indeed, while I worked on the article I was frustrated with the CLI, so
I wrote this Emacs "hack":

https://gitlab.com/emacs-guix/emacs-guix/issues/13

This is essentially what you propose, but to have it at the CLI level
would provide several benefits:

- More universal.
- Possibly more optimized (e.g. caching).



At the end of the article, I also talk about reproducibility, which is
currently quite cumbersome to deploy because of the need to refer to a
"specific guix channel checkout".

Konrad talked about how we could possibly improve the CLI to deal with
that as well:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-10/msg00511.html

Both issues could be addressed the same way.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/