Subject: [bug#34486] [PATCH 0/1] Add '--inherit' to 'guix environment'

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2019 23:16:57 +0100

Hi Eric,

Eric Bavier <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I wonder if the word "inherit" here might be too easily confused with
> the idea of package inheritance.  Could we possibly use an option name
> that is familiar?  Of-hand I'm thinking of sudo's '-E' and
> '--preserve-env'.  SLURM itself uses '--export'.  Both of these tools
> requires passing a list of individual environment variables, but
> supporting regexp-matching makes sense to me, especially with the SLURM
> use-case in mind.

That’s a good point, I did wonder too and spent some time thinking about
the choice of words (“inherit”, “preserve”, “keep”, and more elaborate
phrases) and in the end settled with “inherit”.

> Now I'm having second thoughts.  Since this will be invoked as 'guix
> environment --inherit' hopefully the proximity of the word
> 'environment' will be strong enough to dispell associations with
> other types of inheritance.

Yeah, hopefully.

If it sounds confusing or unclear at first, then perhaps we should
change.  What do people think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.