Re: Discrepancy between manual and channels.scm

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 at 18:02, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> ison <ison@airmail.cc> skribis:
>
>> Under "6.7 Declaring Channel Dependencies" the examples show names being
>> quoted, such as (name 'some-collection) however this causes guix pull to
>> fail. I don't remember the exact error but it was failing the "match"
>> statement under "resolve-dependencies" in "guix/channels.scm".
>>
>> (name "some-collection") also fails.
>> (name some-collection) succeeds, without any quoting.
>
> Oops you’re right; I’ll push a fix to the manual shortly.

Indeed, it can be confusing to have:

  (name some-collection)

where elsewhere it is quoted.  Related to below, since it is data, does
you make sense to have (name “some-collection”) for .guix-channel and a
’string->symbol’ somewhere.


>> I'm not sure if it's the manual which needs fixing or the code, but
>> specifying the name without quoting would be inconsistent with how
>> channel names are declared in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm.
>
> It’s necessarily different because ‘.guix-channel’ is data whereas
> ‘channels.scm’ is code.

Right, option ’--channels/-C’ of “guix pull” says: «file must contain
Scheme code» then section “Specifying Additional Channels” says «Note
that the snippet above is (as always!) Scheme code».

However, what is maybe less clear is that ’.guix-channel’ is data.  Even
if it is often said «meta-data file .guix-channel».  Maybe the “meta” is
confusing.  Why simply not say «data file».  Or «meta-data file
.guix-channel (which is not code)».

Well, it is confusing because code is data. :-)  And all is using
parenthesis.  And the ’.guix-channel’ looks very similar as channels.scm.

Cheers,
simon