Re: Reorganizing guix package commands

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> writes:

> myglc2 (2016-04-19 00:50 +0300) wrote:
>
>> For overall Guix usability, the overloading of a single guix command for
>> everything is not so good. When you eventually create a man page, it
>> will be intimidating for someone just trying to do per-user package
>> management, which the majority of, and least sophisticated users, will
>> be trying to do.
>>
>> On the other hand there are several "classes" of commands as reflected
>> by the guix CLI being described in several logically different parts of
>> the doc. This structure is not so evident in the CLI structure.
>>
>> A possibly better approach would be to explicitly split the guix
>> command-verse into command classes to better match the structure of the
>> doc and/or the class of the user. For example, per-user ('guix ...'),
>> global-system ('guix-sys ...'), and developer ('guix-dev ...'), or
>> something similar.
>
> Sorry, but I can't agree with this.  I don't see a difference between
> "simple users" and developers.  Guix provides many tools indeed, but I
> don't think they should be organized in groups depending on "user
> classes".

I agree with Alex.  In tools like Emacs we also don’t see this arbitrary
distinction between simple users and advanced users or developers.
That’s the same spirit in Guix.

I do agree that the documentation needs reorganization, and there have
been proposals for that already. 

> I like that all the tools are placed in a single "guix" command, I just
> would like to reorganize it a bit (or a lot :-)).

I agree, but since I don’t have any well-thought-out proposals on how to
improve I’m just quietly following this conversation.

~~ Ricardo