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

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:00:11 +0100

Eric Bavier <[email-masked]> writes:
> 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.

I think “export” is a worse name, especially in combination with “guix
environment”, which sounds like the Guix environment is to be exported.

“preserve” sounds good to me, but it’s also a character longer than
“inherit” ;)

I’m not a big fan of “inherit” because to me it seems to imply that the
existing environment is to be inherited fully, while the actual intent
is to keep only the selected variables.

“keep” or “allow” sound also good to me.

--
Ricardo