Re: Improving the usability of 'guix environment'

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

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?

> And other times it would be nice to create an ad-hoc environment from
> the shell for quickly experimenting with something and not polluting a
> profile:
>
>     guix environment guile guile-sdl # let's tinker with SDL in Guile

Right.

> 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’

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.

WDYT?

Ludo’.