Re: Guix CLI, thoughts and suggestions

[Rostislav Svoboda]

I find the discrepancy regarding two dashes '--' is annoying:

$ guix package --list-generations=1d
...
$ guix describe --list-generations=1d
guix system: error: list-generations=1d: unrecognized option
$ guix describe list-generations=1d
...

And more importantly, I'd be happy if the CLI and REPL syntax were
united, so that there's minimal difference between a shell command
call and a Guile function call. E.g. following would do the same:

$ guix :show emacs
scheme@(guix-user)> (guix :show emacs)


This would greatly facilitate the shell-to-Guile script conversion.

(This way, for comp-sci newcomers, it's much easier to see what a
(bash) shell, with its quirky DSL, really is - not an interface making
computers easier to use, but a barrier obstructing you from properly
using computers as programmable stateful machines. See
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Prompts.html )

Unfortunately, the '#' indicates a comment-start in shells and, as
AFAICS in the source code, we prefer the #:keyword syntax over
:keyword. (Here, in the first step, on an experimental branch, we
could try to add (read-set! keywords 'prefix) everywhere, just to see
what breaks ;-)

Cheers Bost