myglc2 (2016-02-09 05:29 +0300) wrote: [...] > I hope it is OK that I am taking the liberty of reporting things that > seem counterintutive or difficult to understand in the bugs > channel. These may well be operator error or misunderstandings on my > part. I am happy to report in a different channel if that is better. Or > to have you say, "enough of this!"
I think it's ok to do it in bugs. Perhaps guix-devel ML will be more suitable, but I don't know. > About me: I want to never learn another distribution, package manager, > configuration approach, or deployment manager. So I really want you to > succeed. I have spent ~ 3 weeks studying and using Nix, NixOS and > guixSD. I have used computers to build models since 1975 and I hope to > use guix in my next work. I figure that if something puzzles me, it may > be puzzeling to others and a barrier to guix' adoption. I want to help > reduce such barriers. And thank you for this! > BACK TO THE "BUG" > > Yes, it is probably not a bug in a technical sense and/or given the way > you conceptualize guix. But, at the risk of being a bore, may I please > restate: > > It seemed really counterintuitive that when I did ... > > 'M-x guix-installed packages' > > ... I saw ... > > "No package outputs installed in profile > '/var/guix/profiles/per-user/glc/guix-profile'." > > My concern is that this experience might leave a new user thinking, > "Geez, I know back in the fog of the USB install I added packages. What > kind of package manager is this? It doesn't show me the packages that I > painfully typed in using zile at the console". IMO this is the kind of > doubt that can undermine confidence during the critical first few hours > of software test driving and lead a user to abandon the experment. I would say that a user should get acquainted with the basic concepts of Guix before using it. I think per-user package management is one of such concepts, and it is described in the beginning of (info "(guix) Features") section of the manual. > My own experience: I had been going back to the config.scm files or > typing 'which' to see what was installed. I knew there were generations. > But believe it or not, in the course of working with guixSD for ~ 10 > days, I had not used ... > > 1) "M-x guix-system-generations" > > 2) press RET on the latest generation > > So say I am a dummy. I am fine with that. > > But, wouldn't it be better to combine these functions so even a duummy > will see all the packages? As I suggested in the previous mail, we can add "M-x guix-system-packages". Maybe it would be good to add "M-x guix-user-packages", or maybe name them: - guix-installed-system-packages (for /run/current-system/profile) - guix-installed-user-packages (for ~/.guix-profile) And to leave "M-x guix-installed-packages" for an arbitrary profile specified by a user. WDYT? -- Don't install packages globally, use a user profile!
