Subject: [bug#37443] [PATCH] scripts: pull: Add options for generation management

From: Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2019 08:33:51 +0200

Hi Ludo,

> Cool, applied!

Great, thanks!

> It’s great news that the MOOC will be talking about reproducible
> research!

That's what it has been doing for a while. The news is that it will
contain a tutorial on using Guix. In parallel with the same task
(defining/communicating/restoring a software environment) using
a more heavyweight toolchain: Debian + debuerreotype + Docker.

> Now, it’s true that having two different profiles appears to be hard
> to grasp for newcomers, as Ricardo was saying just now on IRC.

I suspect that the whole idea of profiles (as distinct from the user
account) is not obvious. If I ever extend my tutorial to include
profiles, I would probably introduce them as persistent environments.

And since I am in criticizing mood, the whole Guix management API
suffers from bad naming. Consider "guix pull -l". What does it pull?  Or
"guix package –-roll-back", which doesn't roll back a package but a
profile. Guix is following the lead of git whose command line API makes
sense only to people who have seen it grow historically.

Konrad.