Re: Discoverability at the REPL level

[zimoun]

Hi Tobias,

On Mon, 16 Nov 2020 at 15:03, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> wrote:

> I'm unconvinced there's a use case that justifies reinventing 
> shell aliases in Guix, in a heavy-weight fashion, while 
> simultaneously not being ‘worth’ a real Guixtension package.

For example, I have tried to implement something to deal with
Reproducibility issues [1].  For instance, I run:

   guix repl -L . -- weather-repro.scm | sort | grep ghc

to list (almost) all the unreproducible Haskell packages.  What I would
like (not implemented yet) is to be able to filter by build system for
example, i.e., adds options.  Concretely, let imagine:

   guix repl -L . \
        -- weather-repro.scm --sort=reverse --build-system=haskell,ocaml

which simply becomes:

   guix weather-repro --sort=reverse --build-system=haskell,ocaml

Shell aliases are too limited, if I am not missing the obvious.

Crazier example, use it inside the “time-machine”:

   guix time-machine --branch=version-1.2.0 \
        -- weather-repro --sort=reverse --build-system=haskell,ocaml

which is not affordable via shell aliases.


Aside the power it should provide to the user hand, it could also be
helpful to easily test variant CLI propositions, for example:

  guix env foo --inputs-of bar

doing what “guix environment bar --ad-hoc foo“ currently does.


Cheers,
simon

1: <https://yhetil.org/guix-devel/86mu0rt95k.fsf@gmail.com>