this is a how-to guide which should not be in the reference manual.
it also refers to `nix-env`, which should not be the first thing readers
of the reference manual encounter, as it behaves very differently in
spirit from the rest of Nix.
slightly reword the documentation to be more concise and informative.
Add support to --list-generations
as another way to say
nix-env --profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels --list-generations
the way we did for nix-channel --rollback [generation id]
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>
They are equivalent according to
<https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#hard-line-breaks>,
and the trailing spaces tend to be a pain (because the make git
complain, editors tend to want to remove them − the `.editorconfig`
actually specifies that − etc..).