Re: GnuPG in Guix

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

"g33k0b0y ." <g33k0b0y@gmail.com> writes:

> It seems that Guix can install multiple versions of GPG. It names the
> 1.4.18 version as gpg, and the 2.0.26 version as gpg2.
>
> There is a problem, however.
>
> By default Guix installs the highest version, which is 2.0.26.
> However, an potential newbie could try calling it through bash as gpg.
> This won't work, as it hasn't installed gpg version 1.4.18 and
> therefore is expecting only gpg2 as its command. This is not made
> clear to the user.
>
> If I  am an inexperienced user and install gnupg, from my previous
> experience with other distros, (Trisquel, gNewSense) I would expect to
> use gpg to call it. Imagine my surprise when bash says command not
> found! I am never told to use gpg2 as the command, nor would I think
> of it.
>
> How can we improve this?

My first instinct when a command I expect to be found isn't found is to
try to tab-complete it in some way, because it happens occasionally that
a CLI command has a different name than one would expect, indeed often
because of such version issues.

So I'd have thought it's fine, and people should get used to it; GPG
isn't unique or rare in this regard.  I think Debian does the same too.

Taylan