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

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

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?

- Dave