Re: A couple roadblocks using guix

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

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Omar Radwan <toxemicsquire4@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> The last thing is that I have not found any meta-packages, which allow me
>> to install multiple packages that are needed for the same program, like for
>> instance, there is gcc, make, cmake, and all the bread-and-butter build
>> programs, but you have to name each in the "guix package -i *" declaration
>> to install, but if there was some metapackage, like buildessential (I come
>> from Debian).
>
> Right.  There’s one such meta-package, which is ‘gcc-toolchain’.
> Perhaps more are needed.
>
> OTOH, ‘guix environment’ can really do “meta-packages on demand”, so to
> speak, so I wonder whether things like ‘build-essential’ make so much
> sense in that context.

However, because 'guix environment' doesn't manipulate a user's
profile, I think that it would still be very useful to create these
meta-packages.  For this specific case, yes, 'guix environment' can be
used to fetch the necessary GCC toolchain to develop something, but
what about non-development packages?  It would be very convenient to
be able to run 'guix package -i xfce-desktop', for example.

My 2 cents.

- Dave