Re: guix environment guix doesn't provide guix dependencies?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

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

> On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 5:20 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> skribis:
>>
>>> John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> writes:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>>> I don't think so.   Running ./bootstrap is not part of the normal process for *building*
>>>> guix - only for bootstrapping.  But you are right - it is common to want to do that.
>>>> For this reason I often run:
>>>>
>>>>  guix environment guix --ad-hoc automake autoconf texinfo help2man
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But perhaps you are right - the manual might want to mention this.
>>>>
>>>> J'
>>>
>>> That makes sense.  I feel like it used to provide all the dependencies,
>>> including autoconf etc., but that was months ago, and I might be
>>> mis-remembering.  It works fine when I add the needed bootstrap
>>> dependencies with --ad-hoc.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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?

Good idea.  I guess it could essentially be an alias for the current
‘guix-devel’.  Could you look into it and update the docs accordingly?

Thanks!  :-)

Ludo’.