On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote: > Hello! > > "Thompson, David" <dthomps...@worcester.edu> skribis: > >> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 10:05 PM, Mathieu Lirzin <m...@gnu.org> wrote: >>> l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > > [...] > >>>> What about providing a ‘guix.scm’ file that people could pass to ‘guix >>>> environment -l’ (instead of typing the long command above), and to ‘guix >>>> package -f’ (info "(guix) Invoking guix package")? >>> >>> 'guix environment -l' uses a package definition. To me this abstraction >>> doesn't fit well in a development context: >> >> It *does* fit well. This use-case is why I wrote 'guix environment' >> in the first place. > > [...] > >>> if the user wants to enter this environment Later it will have to invoke >>> './guix-env'. >> >> This just makes things more inconvenient and limits potential utility. > > That sounds harsh.
I'm sorry. > I don’t have a better answer for Mathieu other than ‘guix environment > -l’, and I think it does the job well. > > But I also think that Mathieu’s concerns must not be dismissed. For > instance, it’s true that some of the metadata in ‘package’ forms looks > irrelevant for the purposes of setting up a build environment—no big > deal, but still it doesn’t “feel” completely right. My intention was to define it just like a regular package so that users can do whatever they want with it: build it, install it, or make a development environment using it. > Conversely, useful metadata is missing: for instance, I’d like to add > something that would allow me to specify the equivalent of ‘--network > --expose=$HOME/.gdbinit’ in development environments I use. > > Perhaps the solution is to introduce a new way to declare development > environments? It would be similar to ‘package’, but without ‘synopsis’, > ‘description’, and a couple other things; it could have additional > fields to describe container setups and such likes; it would compile > down to a bag, just like packages. > > What do you think? Hmm, that sounds like a good idea. Maybe I'll try to write a prototype sometime. The downside of this method is that one could no longer use the same expression as input to 'guix build -f' or 'guix package -f'. - Dave
