Re: Store channel specification in profile

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Pierre,

> We've made some progress on the topic during the Guix Days.

Thanks for the summary!

> The Plan©:
>
> On every profile installation, we generate a "specifications.scm" file alongside
> the internal "manifest".

Sounds good.

> Problems:
>
> - There may be too many provenances, we need to add a CLI flag to
>   ignore provenance.

Too many in what sense?

I'd just print a warning if the specification refers to more than, say,
five inferiors. Users can then clean up their profile or live with the
mess. Cleaning up just means updating the profile. That would re-create
specifications.scm, in a better way than a special CLI flag because
specifications.scm is always the same as the current profile.

> Proposed format for "specifications.scm": we can reuse
> `specifications->manifest`.  Each entry is either or string, in which case it
> acts as before, or a list, with the following self-explanatory elements:

Looks good.

> A somewhat unrelated propostion: To avoid further confusion between the internal
> "manifest" and the user-facing "--manifest", we could rename the internal
> manifest to $profile/internal-maifest.

Fine, but not so critical. I doubt there are many users who ever look at
that file.

Cheers,
  Konrad.