GNU bug report logs - #47911
Improving the package outputs UI

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From: Leo Famulari <leo <at> famulari.name>
To: 47911 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#47911: Package outputs should be described in the UI
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2021 13:38:31 -0400

At least once a month I have to help somebody on IRC who didn't notice
that our Git package is split into multiple outputs.

They can't find `git send-email`, and the Guix package UI doesn't make
this clear enough.

I had the idea that package outputs besides 'out' and 'debug' should
have very brief descriptions that are exposed in `guix show` and `guix
search` and the `guix package` equivalents.

So, maybe it would look like this:

------
$ guix show git
name: git
version: 2.31.1
outputs: out send-email svn credential-netrc credential-libsecret subtree gui
  * send-email: Tools for an email-based Git workflow
  * svn: Provides git-svn, for bidirectional operation between Subversion and Git repositories
  * credential-libsecret: Whatever that is
  * subtree: Who knows?
  * gui: A graphical interface for exploring a Git repository
  * etc...
systems: x86_64-linux i686-linux
dependencies: asciidoc-py3 <at> 9.0.1 bash-minimal <at> 5.0.16 bash <at> 5.0.16 curl <at> 7.74.0 docbook-xsl <at> 1.79.1 expat <at> 2.2.9 gettext-minimal <at> 0.20.1 glib <at> 2.62.6 libsecret <at> 0.20.4 openssl <at> 1.1.1i pcre2 <at> 10.35
+ perl-authen-sasl <at> 2.16 perl-cgi <at> 4.51 perl-io-socket-ssl <at> 2.066 perl-net-smtp-ssl <at> 1.04 perl-term-readkey <at> 2.38 perl <at> 5.30.2 pkg-config <at> 0.29.2 python <at> 3.8.2 subversion <at> 1.14.1 tcl <at> 8.6.10 tk <at> 8.6.10
+ xmlto <at> 0.0.28 zlib <at> 1.2.11
location: gnu/packages/version-control.scm:173:2
homepage: https://git-scm.com/
license: GPL 2
synopsis: Distributed version control system  
description: Git is a free distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
------

The output of `guix show` and `guix search` are in recutils format, and
we'd need to make sure that these new UI elements continued that
valuable tradition.

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