Subject: [bug#43477] Guix aliases? (was: [bug#43477] [PATCH 0/1] guix: graph: Add 'plain' backend.)

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2020 14:22:25 +0200

On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 at 12:10, Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > There is a "guix graph --path" which is really nice.  Why not "guix
> > graph --list-nodes"?
>
> Wouldn’t the tree view that Ludo proposed match your use case?  You can
> still grep the output (filtering non-alphanum characters), but it would
> be more useful by default.

I would say no.  :-) You are proposing:

   guix graph -b ludo-backend | tr -dc '\0-\177'

right?  I will never remember that.  So it means I would have a script
wrapper, somehow; and in this case, instead a AWK wrapper around the
graphviz backend could already do the job.

Well, it remembers the discussion here [1].

[1] <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-07/msg00358.html>

My understanding of this situation:

 1- specific "guix graph" case: implement something like Ludo
proposed; "--backend plain" in the meaning of non-graphical or
terminal displayable backend.
 2- add a mechanism to have aliases.

The #1 is low priority to me.  Let's expand explanations about the #2.
Now with "guix repl", the user can extend Guix by their own scripts.
Therefore, it could be nice:

 a) to have a location by default (say ~/.config/guix/scripts)
 b) to run them with "guix foo" instead of "guix repl --
~/.config/guix/scripts/foo.scm"

And then, we can all be happy. ;-)
It eases the tests of new experimental command-line tools, I can
locally change the behaviour of "guix environment --ad-hoc", I can
experiment with new output formats for "guix search" instead of
recutils, etc..  Well, the philosophy of custom extensions.

WDYT?

All the best,
simon