Re: What's the difference between a shell environment and a profile?

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Simon and Ludo,

>> It does not differ.  What differs is that “guix shell” raises nothing
>> for the collision – maybe “guix shell” does not check the collision, I
>> do not remember – when “guix package” raises an error for the same
>> collision.
>
> Indeed, ‘guix shell’ does not check collisions, for “historical
> reasons”.  Perhaps something worth fixing at some point:
>
>   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/54350

Thanks for pointing out this behavior, which I find surprising but
understandable for the use case of development environments (although I
didn't expect collisions to be so frequent even in that context).

The problem I have now is how to update my recommendations for
computational scientists, which can be summarized as "run all research
computation in "guix shell" (see
e.g. https://10years.guix.gnu.org/program/#guix-as-a-tool-for-computational-science). As
I just found out, I am recommending people to switch off an important
level of error checking.

I'll think about this a bit and then perhaps comment on the old issue
thread!

Cheers,
  Konrad.