Re: guix environment --ad-hoc should work the other way round

[Thompson, David]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Hartmut Goebel
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> being quite new to guix and playing around with `guix environment`. I
> find it confusing and IMHO it is working the wrong way round:
>
> I'd expect it to get me an environment where the specified packages are
> installed. So I could easily test if a new version of a program works as
> expected. Instead I get an environment where the tools for building
> these packages are installed.
>
> What I actually need to type      | What I'd expect to type
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> guix env --ad-hoc python-2.7      | guix env python-2.7
> guix env python-2.7 --ad-hoc git  | guix env git --XXX python-2.7
>
> (Where XXX is placeholder for something like --for-building ;-)
>
> So basically I'd expect the meaning for the packages in front of
> `--ad-hock` exchanged with those behind.
>
> Please note that these are two different views on environments: The
> currently implemented view i the one of a developer, who wants to set up
> an environment for building quick. The other view is the one of a user,
> who wants to test packages.
>
> I'm in favor of changing `guix environment` to take the seconds view,
> since I assume, this will be the case uses much more often. (Even given
> that there ought to be no difference between developers and users, as
> most users simply will not even think about something like a
> build-environments.)

I disagree.  One of the main use-cases of 'guix environment' is
including a "guix.scm" file in your project's source code repository
that includes a development package so new developers can run 'guix
environment -l guix.scm' to get all of the dependencies of that
package and start hacking.

I think the current behavior should remain unchanged.

- Dave