Re: Medium-term road map

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Ludo,

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 at 15:38, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

>   4. User interface.  Let’s get our act together with ‘guix shell’ and
>      ‘guix run-script’, and let’s address other annoyances that
>      newcomers keep stumbling upon!

Adding some items to the whishlist. :-)

1. Access to the internal checkout without knowing the very internals.

When using "guix time-machine", I am regularly navigating in the Git
history. Therefore, I have to clone <somewhere>, going from the
<workdir> to <somewhere>, run Git commands, going back, etc. Well, it
is not handy since the checkout already exists (in
'~/.cache/guix/<hash>/').

Something like "guix git <command> <options>" should be useful. Even
if I am not clear on how to do with several channels. Maybe:

guix git <guix-options> -- <git-command> <git-options>
guix git -C chan.scm -- --no-pager log --oneline


Considering this new subcommand, it should become easy to add Git tags
and so ease the navigation (for reference [1]).

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-11/msg00513.html


2. Search on all the packages included in Guix since the Big Bang.

It is difficult to find the Guix commit where one package goes in and
the commit where it goes out. The Guix Data Service (GDS) helps a lot
for that! But AFAIK, it is not possible from the CLI and I do not find
it handy when I need it (just because I need to open a webbrowser,
etc.).

IMHO, there is 3 questions:
 - how to build such full historical index locally? Even if it is expensive
 - how to fetch it from GDS? Or any other substitue?
 - how to append new packages locally? For example with packages from channels.

The bonus question is feeding SWH to be "guix time-machine" bullet-proof. :-)


Cheers,
simon