Subject: [bug#43477] Guix aliases?

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:56:42 +0200

Hi,

zimoun <[email-masked]> skribis:

> 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 don’t think so.  The tree view would be a way to visualize the graph,
first and foremost.

What I meant to say was that, if we have other use cases, we can write
new commands or extend existing ones to cater to those needs.  That’s
how ‘guix size’, etc. came to life.  “Listing nodes” is not a use case
per se, but rather an means to an end; let’s focus on the ends.  :-)

(Also, let’s avoid Unix arguments; the primary composition level in Guix
is Scheme, not byte streams on stdout.)

>  2- add a mechanism to have aliases.

I agree it’d be nice but… we’re drifting off-topic.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.