Subject: Re: [bug#35456] [PATCH 0/1] Add 'guix install', 'guix remove', and 'guix upgrade'

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2019 15:26:41 +0200

Hi Jonathan,

Jonathan Brielmaier <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On 4/27/19 6:25 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Thoughts?  Rejection?  Happiness?  :-)
>
> I think we shouldn't do this for the 1.0 release. We should take some
> time here. One reason is that it's quite some work to get this
> documented and then translated...

The patch provides documentation that boils down to ~10 lines since
these are just aliases.  (Also, I think it’s reasonable to say we took
our time: it had been in ‘1.0.org’ since July 2018 and we’ve been
discussing it for years before that.  :-))

> The idea of offering new commands for often used ones, is very good.
> Personally I would also like to have 'guix search' and 'guix show', as I
> use them quite often :)

Yeah, why not.

> What I like about the guix command line interface, is the consistency
> and logic. Especially if I compare it with some random (open)SUSE tool
> like zypper, which has a almost 50 subcommands ("zypper SUBCOMMAND").
> That's something we shouldn't imitate.
>
> I feel that grouping commands in subcommands and subsubcommands like
> with 'guix system' is a good idea. At the moment I see there some room
> for improvement.
>
> We have a lot of developer commands directly under 'guix', like
> download, link etc. But the most "end-user" commands are under 'guix
> package' or 'guix system'...
>
> For 'guix system' it could make sense to move 'guix system
> {container,vm-image,disk,docker-image}' to something like 'guix create'.

I agree the CLI structure could be improved in several areas.  In fact,
there have been radical proposals in the past to overhaul the whole CLI.

I think “guix install” & co. require special attention though: people
have come to expect install/remove/upgrade sub-commands from their
package manager and these are the first commands they’ll run.  It costs
us very little in terms of maintenance, but it certainly helps newcomers
get started.

Does that make sense?

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.