David Thompson <dthomps...@worcester.edu> skribis:
> Lately I've been wanting to version control the list of packages that I
> install in my user profile so that I can sync it amongst many machines.
> So, I took a stab at adding a new '--apply' option to 'guix package'
> that reads in a package list from a Scheme file and creates a new
> generation of the profile with only those packages are installed.
> Here's an example configuration:
>
> (use-modules (gnu))
> (use-package-modules base less guile emacs admin ruby mail pumpio man)
>
> (list ruby
> coreutils
> less
> man-db
> notmuch
> guile-2.0
> emacs
> dmd
> offlineimap
> pumpa)
Yes, that sounds very useful.
As usual though, there’s the issue of multiple-output packages. The
above snippet is nice, but doesn’t allow you to specify a particular
output of a package.
What about instead requiring people to return a manifest:
(use-modules (guix profiles))
(use-package-modules base emacs guile)
(manifest (cons (package->manifest-entry gcc-toolchain "debug")
(map package->entry
(list gcc-toolchain emacs guile-2.0))))
That means we’ll have to document (guix profiles).
It’s more verbose than what you suggest, though. If you insist ;-), we
could allow a list of packages instead of a manifest, though I’d prefer
not to do that.
WDYT?
> Below is a naive patch that does the job, but is unideal because it
> doesn't do some nice things like display the diff between generations
> before building.
For that you would need a procedure to infer the manifest transaction:
(manifests->transaction m1 m2)
;; returns a <manifest-transaction>
and then that could be passed to ‘show-manifest-transaction’.
However, I’m not sure it’s very useful. Perhaps it would be enough to
write “installing new manifest from foo.scm with 42 entries.”
WDYT?
> I'm looking for some guidance to make this option mesh better with the
> rest of the 'guix package' utility. Any help is appreciated.
Overall it looks OK to me!
[...]
> + (option '("apply") #t #f
> + (lambda (opt name arg result arg-handler)
> + (values (alist-cons 'apply (load arg) result)
> + arg-handler)))
It would be better to delay loading until after arguments have been
parsed, as in ‘guix system’. The procedure to load the file should be
similar to ‘read-operating-system’.
We’ll need documentation and tests, too. :-)
Thank you!
Ludo’.
