Re: Add guix install command

[Chris Marusich]

Hi,

That sounds like it could be a reasonable compromise to me, as long as it's clearly documented in the Texinfo and help text that it's an alias. However, it seems to me that it would duplicate the well known features of any shell (i.e. defining your own aliases or functions to make certain frequently used commands easier to use), so in my opinion it's not necessary and just complicates things ever so slightly.

Ultimately this is probably not a major issue, and I am sure I will be able to use guix either way. However, I have seen one too many enormously complex and confusing pieces of software, so I personally have an allergic reaction to anything that unnecessarily introduces complexity, even a tiny amount of it.

Best regards,
Chris

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 09:23 Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi!

I sympathize with the idea that ‘guix package -i’ and co. can be
cumbersome to type and maybe non-obvious, so I would be happy to add
‘guix install’, ‘guix remove’, and ‘guix search’.  I would prefer to
document ‘guix package’ as the canonical interface though, for the
reasons David and Chris gave.

However, this should be gratis in maintenance costs IMO, which means no
code duplication and equivalent functionality.

Thus, that probably means making ‘guix install’ a strict alias for ‘guix
package -i’, with the oddities that you mentioned, Andy (one could run
‘guix install foo -r bar’ and so on.)

So, what about adding a simple alias mechanism for ‘run-guix-command’ in
(guix ui) and using it to define those three aliases?  ‘guix help’ and
similar would explicitly mark them as aliases.

Eventually, we could allow users to define aliases via
~/.config/guix/aliases, say.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.