Re: IDEA: Give Our Generations a Name

[Csepp]

Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com> writes:

> Am Dienstag, dem 17.01.2023 um 01:52 +0000 schrieb Csepp:
>> 
>> "jgart" <jgart@dismail.de> writes:
>> 
>> > Hi Guixers,
>> > 
>> > What do you think if we would be able to give past generations a
>> > name?
>> > 
>> > I'm thinking of the way you can do the following with git:
>> > 
>> > git stash -m "My description of this important stash."
>> > 
>> > I think this would help differentiate slight differences that would
>> > be hard to tell what the state of that generation was by just
>> > looking at the differences of profile package content.
>> > 
>> > to bloat? or not to bloat? that is the question
>> 
>> Since generations are just symlinks to profiles in the store and a
>> profile can be in multiple generations, this would require wrapping
>> the profile with some additional metadata.  I guess it's technically
>> as simple as adding a "dummy" package that just contains the name in
>> a file in output/etc/generation-name.txt or something, that would get
>> unioned into the profile, and then it's a simple matter of outputting
>> that info in --list-generations.
>> Right?
> I actually have a better idea.  Note how each generation has the name
> ${common-identifier}-$generation-link.  You could thus simply store a
> tag by using ${common-identifier}-$tag and simply pointing that at the
> right link.  Downside is, that you're limited to the "standard"
> alphanumeric + dash character set, plus the first character shouldn't
> be a number, but I'd say this is good enough for most practical
> purposes.
>
> Cheers

Hmm, yup, much simpler.
Although for system generations it doesn't help much, but that could be
handled by setting the name in the OS record.