Re: The case for moving raw binaries

[Philip McGrath]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022, at 12:59 PM, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:
> Am Freitag, dem 29.04.2022 um 11:27 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
>> [...]
>> 
>> I thought that
>> 
>>   (if already-wrapped?
>>       ;; PROG is already a wrapper: add the new "export VAR=VALUE"
>>       ;; lines just before the last line.
>>       [...])
>> 
>> in 'wrap-program' would avoid creating ..foo-real-real?
> You are correct, I was going on old info that I haven't checked since.
>
> This leaves us with
>> That said, the proposed new behaviour seems reasonable to me --
>> "pidof emacs" would then actually find Emacs.
> and the annoyance that "." shell-completes to all the wrapped binaries.
> For the former, there is IIRC still a bug in tramp (and I'm sure other
> emacs packages), because a process name doesn't match the expected
> regexp.
>
> As for where to move things, I'm starting to lean a little closer
> towards having an own output.  That way, we don't need to worry about
> stuff from different directories (e.g. bin and sbin) shadowing each
> other (even though that shouldn't occur), but more importantly, if we
> need to copy data into rawbin so that it's correctly resolved, we can
> do that.  The only thing that doesn't quite work is relative resolution
> of commands, which would go through the wrapper-less binaries instead.
> However, given that the wrapperless binary is invoked from a wrapped
> binary, I am 73.69% certain, that this ought not to create too much of
> a problem w.r.t. the set environment variables.
>
> WDYT?

I was mildly annoyed recently with several programs that use the ".foo-real" 
name in their `--help` output, for example:

```
$ guix shell --pure reuse -- reuse -h
usage: .reuse-real [-h] [--debug] [--include-submodules]
```

I wondered about just changing `wrap-program` to put the real program at 
`.real/foo` instead of `.foo-real`. One advantage is that it wouldn't need any 
special cooperation like setting up an output or an environment variable.

-Philip