Subject: Re: bug#50960: [PATCH 00/10] Add 'guix shell' to subsume 'guix environment'

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2021 15:41:16 +0200

Hi Ludo,

I have not reviewed all in detail, only applied the series and run some
checks based on my "workflow".  All looks good to me.

The environment variable named GUIX_ENVIRONMENT remains unchanged.  I
have no opinion if it is misleading or not for newcomers.

(I have not checked the behaviour about implicitly loading some files –
since I am not a big fan of implicit behaviour: «Explicit is better than
implicit.» and «In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to
guess.», as a good Zen says – that’s not the consensus though.  The road
seems to go toward,

    guix time-machine -- shell

which appears to me handy in some cases but wrong on principles.  As I
explained here <http://issues.guix.gnu.org/50960#70>.)

About completion, “guix environment” is in zsh and fish, “guix shell” is
not yet.

Last, in the manual, this,

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Here, @command{guix environment -C} creates a container and spawns a new
shell in it (@pxref{Invoking guix shell}).  The @command{strace gdb}
part adds the @command{strace} and @command{gdb} commands to
the container, which you may find handy while debugging.  The
@option{--no-grafts} option makes sure we get the exact same
environment, with ungrafted packages (@pxref{Security Updates}, for more
info on grafts).
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

in the node «Debugging Build Failures» should be replaced.  Because the
example just above this snippet does not refer to “guix environment”.

Well, the section «Invoking guix environment» should be revamped.
Especially, all the examples.  Let do that by another commit (later).

Cheers,
simon