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Top-level
 @csepp The answer is twofold: (1) providing concise ways to express things packagers may want to do, and (2) presenting data in a human-friendly way (lowering gexps and pretty-printing the result). One can still do “,pp (package-arguments grep)” but that’s less convenient. See https://issues.guix.gnu.org/67489 for a discussion. 3 comments
 @civodul Maybe this is a too far reaching problem, but: if the issue is that the string serializations of packages are not nice to read, why not make Guile serialize things nicely by default? @csepp This is meant as a handy interface to inspect packages. Doing the same in a script is ~10 lines of code: But it’s not so useful: in a script, you’d rather call ‘package-arguments’ and preserve gexps as is instead of lowering them, or you’d lower the whole package. |
Gregory's Server
@civodul The problem is that this makes hard to use these in scripts. I ran into exactly this issue when I was writing my MirageOS importer (which I promise I'm gonna try upstreaming during the holidays 😅). I needed to build a package that just ran mirage configure and use the dune config file from it to get the dependency list and call the opam importer, which then generated the code.
Sure, I figured out how to do it in the end, but it was more complicated than just calling (build thing).