Idea: "guix log"

[ng0]

TL;DR: thoughts about a potential new guix command, guix log.

I have a couple of ideas and two of them can be combined into a
new guix subcommand family, guix log, while the other (pfl
inspiration) is open.

I used and developed with/for Gentoo for a while and I always
found `pfl' nice. The bad thing is that it queries
http://www.portagefilelist.de/ (if you tell it to do so) and
without portage it is kinda useless. I haven't tried packaging
portage with stripped features for guix yet (I have some Gentoo
tools packaged), because I think we can do better. Quote from pfl:

   Portage File List collects which files are installed by which
   ebuild on users machines. It shares this data publicly for
   searching/browsing.
   It allows user to search for files that are not installed on
   their system and figure out which ebuild they need to install in
   order to obtain it.

Here is what I think we can do: We can record the file names
of every build, and do the queries offline (for software the
local machine has) or query hydra.


Next tool, next idea (the guix log family): A log viewer. Gentoo
has more than one. The way we currently save logs could be more
human friendly. It doesn't need a restructuring of the folders
(yes I know about the switch for logfiles) but we could have
something similar to https://github.com/gentoo/elogv which
provides an easy way to read thelogs (nothing more). In addition
to that, our log reader could extract the log and save it if
requested to do so.
Furthermore, a log parser which can tell you how long a build
took, on average/every time. This is similar to
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genlop
(https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/app-portage/genlop/genlop-0.30.10-r1.ebuild).
You don't want to query hydra via emacs or your webbrowser every
time (at least I don't do this), so a small programm to read out
the start and finish time of a log would be great.


What do you think?
-- 
♥Ⓐ  ng0 -- https://www.inventati.org/patternsinthechaos/