Re: Transformations Shell Syntax

[John Kehayias]

Hello,

On Sun, Jul 02, 2023 at 09:54 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> HI,
>
> John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com> skribis:
>
>> As one who also would like a shorter syntax option, here's a quick
>> thought: what about a short version of what we have for when there
>> is only one package given or it can be applied to all packages/be a
>> positional argument? An example is perhaps best, so what if we could
>> write:
>>
>> guix shell <package> --with-latest
>>
>> or guix shell <package> -<a letter which is available>
>>
>> which is short for
>>
>> guix shell <package> --with-latest=<package>
>>
>> or even
>>
>> guix shell <package1> <package2> <package3> --with-latest
>>
>> to apply to all packages.
>
> This should be possible.  We should check the option parsers and
> transformation procedures in (guix transformations).
>

Sounds good, seems like a nice little project for someone. I'll pass
for the time being as I catch up on my patches and trying to review
more. (And I want to add some basic multi-arch support to the FHS
container, too.)

>> Or something like
>>
>> guix shell <package1> <package2> --with-git-url=<a git url for package3> 
>> <package3>
>>
>> and so on.
>
> This I’m unsure; one might argue that it’s also ambiguous, I’d always
> wonder what ‘--with-git-url’ applies to.
>

I generally agree; I'm not a fan of too much positional-ness in
arguments as it can get confusing. Though we do have --development for
guix shell already, of course.