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

[David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

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)'

> 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.

For this case, since there is already a guix-devel package, is it okay
to just refer to that?  It's simpler that needing to add '-i autoconf
automake libtool graphviz gettext'. Alternatively, we could maintain a
'development.scm' file specifically for this purpose, then you would
run:

  guix environment -l development.scm

Thoughts?

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
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