Re: How do I check out a package w/o installing it?

[myglc2@gmail.com]

On 01/29/2018 at 15:46 Thompson, David writes:

> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> wrote:
>> George myglc2 Clemmer <myglc2@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I tried to use 'guix environment' to check out znc this way ...
>>>
>>> guix environment --ad-hoc znc -- emacs -nw
>>>
>>> the znc man is unavailable ...
>>
>> I have been wondering the same. It would be nice if at least the man and
>> info documentation was available somehow. What needs to be done in this
>> regard?
>
> If you want to use 'man', include the man-db package in your
> environment. If you want to use 'info', include the info-reader
> package (I think).
>
> To be more general, there isn't any "magic" here.  The znc package
> includes man pages in its output directory, but 'man' won't know about
> it unless it's on $MANPATH.  In order to make Guix set the proper
> MANPATH, you need to include man-db because that package is the one
> that defines the native search path for MANPATH.  Check out the man-db
> package recipe in gnu/packages/man.scm to see how we encode these
> details.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> - Dave

Thank you Dave! That does help ;-)

So 'guix package -i znc' implicitly adds man-db and info-reader.

Maybe 'guix environment --add-hoc znc' should do that too?

Does this merit submission to bug-guix or guix-devel?

TIA - George