Re: Improving the usability of 'guix environment'

[David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:
>
>> But all of that boilerplate is unnecessary since it's not possible to
>> actually build the package successfully without a proper hash of the
>> source AFAICT.  Really, I would rather just use a simple list of
>> packages:
>>
>>     (list autoconf automake guile-2.0 guile-json libgcrypt)
>
> What about adding a case for the handling of ‘-l’ such that, if the file
> evaluates to a list of packages, it does what you suggest?

I'm hesitant to do that, because I would also like for a list of
packages to be usable for building the environment as it's done
currently.  Only allowing a single package in a file is a limitation
right now.

>> I propose adding a new flag that indicates whether we want the packages
>> themselves or their inputs in the environment.  If we assume that the
>> default behavior is to include the packages themselves, a --inputs flag
>> could indicate to use the package(s) inputs instead:
>>
>>     guix environment --inputs emacs
>
> That makes sense.
>
> In terms of UI, what about rather something keeping an interface close
> to that of ‘guix package’:
>
>   guix environment -i guile guile-sdl
>   # semantically equivalent to ‘guix package -i guile guile-sdl’

So without the -i switch, it would behave as it does now?  Okay, but I
guess I would prefer to optimize for the common case, which in my case
would be having -i on by default.

> Now that I think of it, we could even move -E to ‘guix package’ itself:
> that would make it easy to create a scratch environment based on an
> existing profile.

I'm a bit confused about that.  Are you suggesting we merge 'guix
environment' into 'guix package'?

-- 
David Thompson
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