Hi!
Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> skribis:
> zimoun <zimon.touto...@gmail.com> writes:
[...]
>> What about "guix spawn"?
>
> “spawn” is a very generic verb, much like “enter” (enter what?) or
> “make”. “shell” has the awkward property of meaning different things
> dependent on how you interpret it: “to shell” means to *remove* an outer
> shell (like that of a nut) whereas “guix shell” as a noun would imply
> *wrapping“ something in a shell. It sends mixed signals. We’d probably
> want people to understand it as ‘spawn a command line shell’, but that’s
> really not the primary purpose of ‘guix environment’.
Yeah.
> Thinking about words some more I started to wonder: do we want verbs or
> nouns?
I think verbs are preferred, but nouns are accepted. :-)
For example, ‘time-machine’ was recently introduced, but I find it nice
that way; ’travel-in-time’ wouldn’t be better.
It’s much like Scheme APIs: we use nouns for object properties (like
‘commit-parent’) and verbs for things that are best viewed as actions
(like ‘fold’). This is all subjective in a functional setting!
> If we were looking for verbs that express the idea of creating an
> environment or to place a thing inside of an environment we could use
> one of these:
>
> to envelop (envelop what though? This seems to require two objects.)
> to arrange (kinda misses the point)
> to stage (in the theatric sense)
> to frame (not in the criminal sense)
> to contain (…the resulting process in a possibly leaky environment)
> to join (…all these packages to form a new whole)
> to group (…all these packages)
>
> (As a bonus: ‘to environ’ exists, but it suffers from the same problem
> as ‘to envelop’.)
>
> Here are some nouns that might work:
>
> scene
> frame
> context
> union
>
> All of them are shorter than “environment”! :)
More data points! :-)
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ wn environment -synsn
Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun environment
2 senses of environment
Sense 1
environment
=> situation, state of affairs
Sense 2
environment, environs, surroundings, surround
=> geographical area, geographic area, geographical region, geographic
region
$ wn environ -synsv
Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of verb environ
1 sense of environ
Sense 1
surround, environ, ring, skirt, border
=> touch, adjoin, meet, contact
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
Maybe “union”, “surround”, or… “profile”?
(I’d reserve “guix spawn” or “guix run” for the tool that runs commands
in a least-authority environment, as we’ve discussed in the past.)
Ludo’.
