Subject: Re: bug#31786: 'pre-inst-env guix --version' is not updated by new commits"

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2018 00:02:04 +0200

Hi George,

> The current doc reflects the needs and sensibilities of the hackers,
> maintainers, and sysops that have built Guix. These "elite" users have
> different needs and judge what is important quite differently from end
> users. This guarantees that the current doc is inadequate for end users.
> So, if, as you say, you want to make Guix accessible to end users, you
> need to make changes in the doc.  The questions: How? What?
[…]
> I said: I use 'pre-inst-env guix' this way and this is a bug.

“pre-inst-env” really should not be used by people other than
developers.  It is only available when building Guix from a clone of the
git repository.

We do not recommend “pre-inst-env” for any other purpose than to make
changes to the code, so I would not like to document the quirks and
limitations of “pre-inst-env” in the manual, as this is not how Guix is
supposed to be used generally.

> Proposed (revised) footnote:
>
> (3) The Guix version in the Guix build is set by './bootstrap'. Thus,
> the version reported by './pre-inst-env guix --version' is not updated
> by subsequent 'git pull; make' steps. To update the version (and rebuild
> everything), use 'git clean -dfx; ./bootstrap; ./configure; make'.

I’m wary of adding this for similar reasons that Ludo wrote earlier.  In
my opinion this ends up cluttering the manual with notes and what I
consider to be only tangentially relevant for readers of the manual.

--
Ricardo