Subject: Re: bug#38529: Make --ad-hoc the default for guix environment proposed deprecation mechanism

From: Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2019 22:12:17 +0100

Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Maybe I miss a point. It is not: "watch out, this will do something
>> else in the future" but "watch out, this was doing something else in
>> the past and the change happened the <date> in <commit>".
>
> Concrete example: I am writing a tutorial about using Guix for
> reproducible research. It shows several uses of "guix environment", some
> of them without '–add-hoc' or '–inputs-of'. I know my examples will
> cease to work in a few months. What am I supposed to do about this?

I wonder if we should simply bump the version number to indicate that
this is a breaking change?

Another more difficult option would be to do what responsible API
developers on the web do: to version their API and to make the API
version selectable.  I don’t know *how* to do this elegantly, and
there’s a real maintenance cost (it seems small in this case), but
configuration files can be used for changing new defaults.

--
Ricardo