As I use 'guix environment', I realize that I often do not want to
create an environment from the inputs of a package, but rather that I
want to create an environment from the package itself. I didn't think
it was an issue when I did the initial development, but in practice it
has proven to be inconvenient.
For example, a development environment for guix-web requires autoconf,
automake, guile-2.0, guile-json, and libgcrypt. To create such an
environment, I currently use a dummy package:
;; env.scm
(package
(name "guix-web")
(version "0.1")
(source ".")
(build-system gnu-build-system)
(native-inputs
`(("autoconf" ,autoconf)
("automake" ,automake)))
(inputs
`(("guile" ,guile-2.0)
("guile-json" ,guile-json)
("libgcrypt" ,libgcrypt)))
(synopsis "Web frontend for GNU Guix")
(description "Guix-web is a web interface to the GNU Guix package
manager written in GNU Guile Scheme and JavaScript.")
(home-page "https://gitorious.org/guix-web/guix-web";)
(license agpl3+))
;; shell
guix environment -l env.scm
But all of that boilerplate is unnecessary since it's not possible to
actually build the package successfully without a proper hash of the
source AFAICT. Really, I would rather just use a simple list of
packages:
(list autoconf automake guile-2.0 guile-json libgcrypt)
And other times it would be nice to create an ad-hoc environment from
the shell for quickly experimenting with something and not polluting a
profile:
guix environment guile guile-sdl # let's tinker with SDL in Guile
I propose adding a new flag that indicates whether we want the packages
themselves or their inputs in the environment. If we assume that the
default behavior is to include the packages themselves, a --inputs flag
could indicate to use the package(s) inputs instead:
guix environment --inputs emacs
Thoughts?
--
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate
