Re: Reorganizing guix package commands

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès (2016-04-18 20:20 +0300) wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>>> I can see how adding “package” everywhere helps categorize things
>>> mentally, but as a user interface, I think it would be rather bad.
>>
>> As a user, I think it would be rather good.  (This is just my user opinion)
>
> To clarify, what I meant is that forcing users to type an additional
> word for common operations just for the beauty of categorization sounds
> unwise to me.
>
> For instance, I’m happy I can type ‘ls’ rather than ‘gnu core file list’.
> :-)
>
> Similarly, it’s not immediately obvious to me that something like “guix
> package edit” and “guix package install” would help newcomers.
>
> On the contrary, they would likely violate the rule of least surprise:
> most other tools provide sub-commands like “install”, some provide
> “edit” and “build” as well, without further categorization.

This makes sense to me.

I think it's also worth noting that this is prime ground for bikeshed[0]
territory.  So it's worth discussing and making changes, but not losing
hair over.

 - Chris

[0] http://shed.bike/