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

From: George Clemmer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2018 21:35:29 -0400

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> writes:

> 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.

Hi Ricardo,

Please read further down the original post. I think you will find that I
already addressed your points.

Collectively, the responses here bring to mind a Harvard Business School
case study I was taught in 1983. The gist of it: Bakers at Holsum Bread
told a salesman that they had figured out how to run his company's bread
making machine at twice the design speed. Because this was twice as fast
as the competitor's machine, they wanted to place a big order for more
machines. When the salesman told the company engineer about the order he
said, "You can't sell any more machines to Holsum because they aren't
using my machine properly!"

- George