Re: more package transformations: overrides

[Sarthak Shah <shahsarthakw@gmail.com>]

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Hello,

> By separate file or stdin your really mean stdin, correct?  As in:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> guix something < args.txt or
> echo "$args" | guix something
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> One note: since this mechanism could be generally useful, it should be
> globally available (like 'guix build' options), for any 'guix'
> invocation.
>
Actually, while using this shell script you could also pass a file directly
i.e all of these will work:
-----(shell)------
./guix-shell-with-args /path/to/some/file-with-args
./guix-shell-with-args < /some/other/file
echo "something from stdin" | ./guix-shell-with-args
-------------------
If needed we could modify the script to only accept a file when a flag like
--read-args-from-file is passed. It's a proof of concept, and I think some
more work would need to be put in for actually implementing it since there
are probably a whole class of possible bugs and errors that we have not
considered.
I agree that it could be beneficial to all guix subcommands; I can see
myself using it with `guix package` for example. In this case we could
perhaps have a subcommand `guix with-args <subcommand>` which lets you
invoke <subcommand> (install, package, build etc) with arguments from stdin
or (optionally) a file.

At this point, we have a real Scheme API we can use :-).  If there's a
> problem with using that, we should work toward improving it.
>

 Yes, on further deliberation I realized that I'm basically writing a DSL
atop manifests   ^_^"

If more people see a use for this suggestion, I could try writing a more
polished shell script for `guix with-args`

---
Happy Hacking!
Sarthak

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