"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 5:20 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> In fact there’s a small time window during which “guix environment guix”
>> doesn’t provide autoconf et al.: it’s when the ‘guix’ variable in (gnu
>> packages package-management) refers to a released tarball instead of a
>> Git checkout, since a build from tarball doesn’t depend on autoconf et
>> al.

How is it possible for this variable to refer to a released tarball in
one commit and a git checkout in another?  I believe you, but I don't
understand how that can happen.

>> So if you run “guix environment guix” on a commit different from
>> v0.11.0 + 1, you effectively get all the dependencies.
>>
>> I admit this is a bit confusing.  Not sure how to document/improve that.
>>
>> Ideas?
>
> How about a public guix-devel package that always builds from the Git repo?
>
> - Dave

That would certainly make it obvious and easy to use.  I think it's a
good idea.

-- 
Chris