Hello Guix hackers, In an effort to finish up a patch to add a --container flag to 'guix environment', I've encountered a serious problem. The --exec flag allows the user to pass an arbitrary command to be run using 'system'. Unlike 'system*', 'system' spawns a command interpreter first and passes the command string in. This is very problematic when using a container, because there's a very good chance that the command interpreter of the running Guile process is not mounted inside the container.
So, I think we should switch to using 'system*' instead which will avoid this hairy issue. However, it's unclear to me how to make this happen. I wanted to use 'system*' since I first wrote 'guix environment', but I couldn't figure out how to make the command line syntax work since each argument needs to be processed separately instead of being bunched up into a string. If the above explanation is confusing, the 'sudo' program provides a good example of the UI I'm after: sudo guile -c '(do-root-things)' But for now we're stuck with this: guix environment --ad-hoc guile -E "guile -c '(do-root-things)'" Now, we can't actually do exactly what 'sudo' does because 'guix environment' already recognizes operands as package names, not program arguments. Perhaps we can use '--' to separate the package list from the command to run: guix environment --ad-hoc guile -- guile -c '(do-root-things)' Does that look okay? Any other ideas? Thanks, - Dave