Re: The future of 'guix environment'

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Christopher Allan Webber
<cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
> Thompson, David writes:
>
>> Ricardo, you are correct that we would lose the ability to use the
>> guix.scm file for both 'guix environment' and 'guix build'.  In
>> practice I don't actually use my guix.scm file this way, so I think
>> it's worth breaking, but maybe you (or someone else) actually uses
>> this and we should think more about it?
>
> I do use guix.scm for testing `guix build'.  Maybe I ma the only one
> though.  It turns out to be very useful to find out whether or not I've
> done something that borked my package that's not obvious because I have
> some compiled .go file around in working directory or something.

Ludovic's suggestion of supporting both package and environment
objects with --load will solve the issue.

>> I wasn't very clear about whether ephemeral or cached would be the new
>> default.  I don't think there is one default for all cases, I think
>> it's more context sensitive.
>
> I'm a bit confused by caching, but IMO maybe the right solution is
> actually guix environment for "environment profiles".  Ie, I want to be
> able to update my guix environment and if it turns out I made a mistake
> easily roll back, just like I can with my user's profile.  Currently
> you can use --root, but you don't have the generations support.

This is what caching would allow.

- Dave