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

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2019 11:10:49 +0100

Hi!

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:

> 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.

So, what about adding ‘--preserve’ (or ‘--keep’? I slightly prefer
“preserve”) and keeping ‘--inherit’ as a deprecated alias?

We could perhaps add ‘-E’ as well, reclaiming the long-deprecated
‘--exec’, WDYT?

Ludo’.