Re: Newbie user question: What do the columns shown by "guix package -I" mean?

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Rodrigo Morales 写道：
> Thanks! That's what I was looking for.

I'm glad to hear it!

> A related question: I didn't understand the part "retain 
> backwards compatibility with isatty/stderr/etc."

First of all: I worded this poorly, as is my wont.  I should have 
said ‘by using’ instead of ‘with’.  We're not trying to be 
compatible with isatty or stderr…

Wat I meant was Guix could use the ‘isatty’ Guile procedure to 
show decorate the columns only when the output is a TTY 
(‘interactive’), or print a header line to ‘stderr’ so it won't be 
captured by a pipe.

I think that any such solution would be fragile, do the wrong 
thing in at least one case, and add too much complexity just to 
sometimes add a header.

Why not simply always add a header?

Someone might be using ‘guix package -I’ in a script, and parsing 
its output.  In fact I guarantee you that several people are doing 
so behind closed doors right now!  Adding a header would break 
such scripts.

I, personally, would welcome breaking their scripts—in exchange 
for adding a ‘--format=<something machine-readable>’ option like 
we already do for ‘guix search’.  A real API that's actually 
reliable and supportable.  I think that's fair.

I just think I'd be outvoted and don't feel like starting a fight 
:-)

Kind regards,

T G-R

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