Re: package management

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

Marcus Moeller <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all.
>
> I managed to install the latest version of GuixSD on my Libreboot Laptop.
>
> Everything works fine, but I got a few questions:
>
> 1. I would like to install Icecat and some additional packages. My first
> try was to run guix package -i icecat which installed icecat into
> /gnu/store/...
>
> When I now start the binary directly from that directory, it works fine,
> but it does not appear in path nor in the Xfce menu.
>
> Do I need to run any additional command to make it visible?

See the following mail:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2015-08/msg00006.html

(and the follow-up mail making a correction; I had the paths wrong).

/gnu/store is merely a "cache" of packages.  They are really installed
into "profiles" (by generating symlinks into the store).

> 2. Is this the way to handle package installation or should I instead
> modify the system configuration and run
>
> sudo guix system reconfigure /path/to/config.scm
>
> afterwards?

Packages declared in the system configuration will be available to all
users of the system (there's a system-wide profile in
/run/current-system).  Running 'guix package -i' will install a package
to your per-user profile.

> 3. How can I modify configuration files of services like ntp? I guess
> this does not work the way I know it by just placing the relevant files
> into /etc. Can this be done via system configuration as well? If so,
> could you please provide an example, e.g. to set a custom time server to
> poll?

Each "service" declared in your system configuration might take an
optional configuration-file argument, or some other "configuration"
argument.  See the documentation of each service you want to configure.

(Disclaimer: so far I only use Guix as a package manager on top of
Debian, and haven't ever configured a GuixSD system yet, so I might be
off on some things.)

> Greets
> Marcus

Hope that helps :-)
Taylan