Re: Plan for 0.9.0

[Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com>]

On 15/10/2015, Thompson, David <dthompson2@worcester.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 8:28 AM, Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@openmailbox.org>
> wrote:
>> Eric Bavier <ericbavier@openmailbox.org> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:44:39 +0200
>>> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@openmailbox.org> skribis:
>>>>
>>>> > ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>>>> >
>>>> >> Dunno, I admit I’m not as enthusiastic as the other people here.
>>>> >> :-)
>>>> >>
>>>> >> What would ‘guix gc’ (without any option) do?
>>>> >
>>>> > Show --help and exit(0)?  ;)
>>>>
>>>> Sure we could do that, but I’m not convinced it’s an improvement.
>>>> WDYT?
>>>
>>> FWIW, I'm not convinced either.
>>
>> I think the enthusiasm for changing ‘guix gc’ was induced by somekind of
>> shared experience of typing it loosely and ending up having to download
>> a lot of substitutes again.  So maybe we can keep ‘guix gc’ as it is but
>> make it interactive by listing what is going to be deleted and ask for
>> confirmation with a [Y/n] prompt.  This solution will also require
>> somekind of a ‘--force’ option for scripting purposes.
>>
>> Does it sound better?
>
> In general, I do not like interactive CLIs.  I'm fine with 'guix gc'
> working as-is.  The re-downloading lots of substitutes issue is not an
> issue about the CLI, but rather about not making store items that you
> want to hang around GC roots.
>
Wow, the discussion is long...

Talking about interactive CLIs, in general I am not a fan of it too,
especially after you get used to the program. That's why I am using
plain apt-get instead of aptitude which uses ncurses. However, I will
say it is sometimes useful. For example, in git clean, there is an
`-i' switch, which can help if you don't want to mess with your
.gitignore file. So perhaps making something GC roots is like putting
it in .gitignore in git, but we should still provide a way for
interacting GC-ing.

I also have an opinions on some other things, but I need to recap it first.