[Nix-dev] Notes and ideas about the Nix-UI proposal

[Kevin Cox]

On Sat, 2016-01-23 at 17:59 +0100, Matthias Beyer wrote:
> > As a suggestion to the transactional behaviour, I’d like to avoid
> > unnecessary shell quoting. How about “+” instead of “;"? I could
> > imagine another non-colliding operator from the nix language, but
> > “;” as a statement separator is going to be confusing because bash
> > already uses it for almost the same thing.
> > 
> 
> I want to second this! Especially because "\" is kinda hard to type
> on german
> keyboards (two strokes and a weird location of both keys,
> ergonomically). "+"
> sounds much better.
> 
> What would be nice is a "repl"-like thing where you can do this:
> 
>     nix transaction
>     > install firefox
>     > uninstall chromium
>     > commit  ## or maybe ctrl-D
>     [nix] transaction about to be committed... doing things now
> 
> (ofc, the `nix install firefox $sep uninstall chromium` variant
> should be
> available as well)
I think it might be even nicer to just allow multiple packages in
install without having to specify the flag again. You can then have a
special prefix to uninstall. It is a little "stranger" but I doubt that
many new users are worried about grouping things in transactions. I'm
imagining something like:
nix install firefox gimp ~chromium # Install Firefox and gimp, remove
chromium
It could also be supported for uninstall to be symmetrical if desired.
I don't know if I'm too sold on this one.
nix uninstall blender openttd ~thunderbird # Remove first two install
the second.
The downside is that this is limited to install and uninstall but I
don't know if there is anything else that would need to be grouped into
a transaction.
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