Re: Transformations Shell Syntax

[Ryan Prior <rprior@protonmail.com>]

I don't like the unpredictability of jgart's original proposal, but maybe something explicit could still look similar.

Suppose you could build emacs-ement these three ways:
# no transform- this is a version packaged in Guix
guix build emacs-ement@0.5.2
# transform using `with-git-commit`
guix build emacs-ement@git-commit:8b56efa9387262514daf63151d41c9e111e79567
# transform using `with-latest`
guix build emacs-ement@latest
# transform using `with-version`
guix build emacs-ement@version:0.8.2

A short syntax for transforms would contribute to readability and ergonomic ease. Worth looking into.

Ryan


------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023 at 5:20 PM, jgart <jgart@dismail.de> wrote:


> 
> 
> > What disturbs me with your suggestion is that it reuses the same syntax
> 
> > that is already used for a different purpose. So in a sense you do
> > "operator overloading", and the same command line then means different
> > things depending on whether the package version is already provided by
> > Guix or not.
> 
> 
> Yes, I see how that can be an CLI smell and "not Guixonic".
> 
> Would be sweet to have something like it but I realize the negative of dirtying the current API's explicitness to get lower verbosity invocations at the shell prompt.