how the different invocations relate to each other seems be
confusing, which is relatable because one has to wire it up in your head
while reading. an explicit reference should make it unambiguous and
easier to notice due to links being highlighted.
Deleting store info corrected (there is a foot-gun in Nix with
`--delete-generations old`!)
Also a few things are cleaned up based on feedback.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
Co-authored-by: Eelco Dolstra <edolstra@gmail.com>
e.g. nix-env -e subversion => nix-env --uninstall subversion
The aim is to make the documentation less cryptic for newcomers and the
long options are more self-documenting.
The change was made with the following script:
<https://github.com/aschmolck/convert-short-nix-opts-to-long-ones>
and sanity checked visually.
Documentation on "classic" commands with many sub-commands are
notoriously hard to discover due to lack of overview and anchor links.
Additionally the information on common options and environment variables
is not accessible offline in man pages, and therefore often overlooked
by readers.
With this change, each sub-command of nix-store and nix-env gets its
own page in the manual (listed in the table of contents), and each own
man page.
Also, man pages for each subcommand now (again) list common options
and environment variables. While this makes each page quite long and
some common parameters don't apply, this should still make it easier
to navigate as that additional information was not accessible on the
command line at all.
It is now possible to run 'nix-store --<subcommand> --help` to display
help pages for the given subcommand.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>