Alex Kost <alez...@gmail.com> skribis: > I think current situation is very confusing to users. A user can't even > install any package. What if he wants to install “guile” from > “base.scm”?
It’s possible, using ‘guix package -e’ (info "(guix) Invoking guix package"). I think guix.el should be able to distinguish packages internally, so that when I choose, say, a specific “guile-2.0.11”, that’s really the one that gets installed (maybe it already does, I haven’t checked.) > I strongly believe this is a problem. You can see the packages that you > can't install or even worse “guix package --list-installed” may tell you > that you have several “foo-1.0:out” installed. Actually when I saw the > packages with the same name/version the first time, I thought it's a > bug. I would say it’s a problem of the distro–i.e., the (gnu packages ...) modules–if several same-named packages are exposed to the user. We’ve discussed several times the problem of having duplicates between base.scm and other modules, but I haven’t come to a satisfying solution. So I agree, these specific cases must be addressed somehow. However, it’s a fundamental feature of the package manager that packages (really: package records) can be freely created, and that the ‘name’ field is just a hint. Duplicates should remain rare in practice, but the UI must be prepared to deal with them IMO. WDYT? Thanks, Ludo’.
