Re: GC hints

[Chris Marusich]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> I agree that this would be more accurate, but isn’t there also a risk
> with making hints too long?  I’m split between the idea of providing
> concise hints that can be pasted and get things done, and the idea or
> not trying to be a substitute for the manual.

I agree the manual should be authoritative, but I also think that if
Guix can provide contextual information, it's great when it does so.
The "did you forget to add (use-module..." hints you added a while back
are a great example of this.  The shorter the better, of course.

I think we're still waiting for Pierre to send his latest patch.  If the
text really is too long, perhaps we can provide concrete examples, a
sentence explaining what they do, and a link to the manual, where we put
the slightly more verbose explanation.  I think the text so far is OK,
but I also have not seen the final version yet.  Pierre, what do you
think?

> Actually, I was also wondering whether we should provide a
>configurable
> mechanism that would, by default, automatically delete old GC roots and
> maybe even run the GC automatically when needed—similar to what Git
> does.

I think it's a great idea to allow a user or system administrator to
configure a policy for automatic GC root clean-up.  I'm not sure about
ad-hoc roots, but for profiles, it would be great to be able to say
something like "Keep the last 2 generations, and delete any others that
are older than 2 weeks".  Perhaps we could enforce the policy any time
that a user runs code that modifies the profiles, such as "guix package"
commands.

Of course, that's a little more than what is being proposed in this
email thread, so it would probably be best to work on that separately.

-- 
Chris

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