Re: Emacs interface for Guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès (2014-07-18 13:16 +0400) wrote:

[...]

>> Actually I think eventually (i.e., soon ;-)) we should add guix.el to
>> the Guix repo.  Among other things, that means that the Scheme code for
>> guix.el can be easily kept in sync with the (guix ...) API, which is
>> more difficult otherwise.
>
> It would be great!  I think the main features should be finished soon:
> now I'm adding support for displaying info about installed outputs, and
> then only implementing actions (installing/deleting) will be left.

Excellent.  We can discuss the details of integration once 0.7 is out.

> Also I have a question: is there such thing as “obsolete package”?
> AFAIU after ‘guix pull’, a user can still have old versions of packages
> installed that don't exist in the new guix anymore.  I.e. after that
> some packages from the current manifest cannot be found with
> ‘(find-packages-by-name "foo" "<old-version>")’.  Am I right?

Yes.  Thus, for such packages, the UI would be unable to display the
details.

Actually, more generally, there is little meta-data about installed
packages, compared to available packages.  The UI can assume that an
installed package called ‘guile-2.0.11’ is probably the same as an
available package with the same name and version, but that’s not
necessarily the case.

It’s possible to check whether they really are the same by computing the
derivation of the available package and comparing its output directory
names to those of the installed package.

So ideally the UI would show a little warning when it knows it doesn’t
match.

(Am I clear?)

Thanks,
Ludo’.