Re: Command line option in addition to GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH - Reason?

[zimoun]

Hi Danny,

Thank you for your insights.

On Thu, 26 Dec 2019 at 21:31, Danny Milosavljevic
<address@hidden> wrote:

> ... why?  There's the environment variable already--what does it give us
> to have yet another way to specify the value?

>From my opinion, the answers to the why is:
 - because it is easier to explain to newcomers; only a new option and
not a new concept,
 - because it adds consistency with other commands, as Pierre said,
 - because it is easier to discover via "guix <cmd> -h"; even if it
should also be easy to add environment variables documentation via
"guix <cmd> -h".


> zimoun wrote:
>
> >But IMHO, the normal use should be via the --load-path option and the
> >GUIX_LOAD_PATH should be less and less used; stay here for historical
> >reason and/or backward compatibility and/or some devel use-case.
>
> Why?  *PATH environment variables have a long tradition in UNIX and are not
> going to vanish (or mean something else any time) soon.  What is the use
> case this change is supposed to enable?

Why? I do not know, maybe gray beard vs young mustache. ;-)
The option "--load-path" is more a flavor of taste than an use case
uncovered by GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH.
And GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH is not going to vanish.


Hope that helps.

All the best,
simon