Re: Better support for single-user systems

[Clément Lassieur]

Hi Taylan,

You don't need to use the root account at all. 

Taylan Kammer <address@hidden> writes:

> Most desktop users have single unix account and are also in control of
> root.  These users might not want to differentiate between the current
> guix version of root and their normal user.  They might also not want
> to differentiate between the packages available to root and the normal
> user.  As such I would propose the following two improvements:
>
> - Allow a system-wide guix installation that's updated with a special
>   variant of 'guix pull' executed by root

You can use you current user's guix installation for all commands that
need root's permissions with 'sudo -E', so you can consider that your
current user's guix account is the system-wide guix account.

For example, 'sudo -E guix system reconfigure config.scm' updates the
system with your user's guix.

> - Allow direct addition of packages to the system profile to obviate
>   the need of running a full 'guix system reconfigure' after adding
>   packages to the system configuration

You don't need this if you use your user's guix installation only.

> (The latter might show a reminder that if the package isn't also added
> to the system config, it will be removed again on the next system
> reconfiguration.)
>
> Currently I use a hack to imitate #1 where I have a unix account
> called 'guix-user' with which I run 'guix pull', and both root and my
> normal user have symlinks to that user's current guix.  For #2 I don't
> have a workaround; I just re-run 'guix system reconfigure' every time.

You definitely don't need this :-)

Clément