Subject: Re: [bug#40373] [PATCH] guix: new command "guix run-script"

From: Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2020 11:10:40 +0200

Hi Ludo,

>> I am of course aware that much of the code in "run-script" is the same
>> as in "repl", which is not good.
>
> Yes, we can probably factorize a bit.  We must make sure ‘-q’ is not
> implemented by this command; ‘-t’ is also useless.

Right.

> We do have that with ‘%standard-build-options’, for instance, although
> not as nicely-structured as we’d like (in general, I’d prefer to have a
> GNU argp-style command-line API than what we have).

It would also be nice to share the documentation for these options among
different scripts. That's actually more lines of code than the code
itself.

More generally, it would be nice to decouple implementation decisions
from user interface decisions. Git provides a nice example of what
happens when user interface design follows ease of implementation
criteria for a while. It's probably the most hated essential piece of
software by now.

>From a user interface point of view, it is preferable to have many
commands with clear names, rather than few commands overloaded with
multiple functions selected by cryptic options.

Cheers,
  Konrad