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Re: “Guix Profiles in Practice”
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
Re: “Guix Profiles in Practice” |
Date: |
Sun, 03 Nov 2019 15:24:21 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) |
Hi,
"Thompson, David" <address@hidden> skribis:
> 'guix environment' is a very composable command, and it's not clear to
> me how I would add the stuff I want onto it and it's even less clear
> if it's a good idea. Probably not. So, I wonder if maybe a new
> subcommand, say 'guix develop', could address this common development
> use-case while allowing 'guix environment' to continue being the swiss
> army knife that it is. Some simple naming conventions could make this
> tool "just work." Running 'guix develop' would check for a profile
> symlink with some canonical name, for example '.guix-develop-profile'.
> If it exists, it applies the environment variables and spawns a
> subshell. If it doesn't exist, it looks for a 'develop.scm' file
> (canonical name TBD), builds the profile, symlinks it to
> '.guix-develop-profile', and then does the prior steps. The tool
> would provide a mechanism to update, etc. and it could even be
> expanded later to spawn services like databases.
That sounds like a good idea. ‘guix develop’ could keep the profiles it
manages under ~/.cache/guix.
Now, this would be very much stateful: you can’t tell in advance whether
you’re going to build a new profile based on the current Guix, or
whether you’re going to reuse a previously cached profile that could be
arbitrarily old. That doesn’t sound great.
Perhaps we should focus on improving the performance of ‘guix
environment’ first and foremost?
Thanks,
Ludo’.