Re: 01/01: services: Add ‘/usr/bin/env’ special file.

[Chris Marusich]

Hi everyone,

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> writes:

> Using a custom script with a /usr/bin/env shebang is pretty common.  You
> don’t need to be a power user for that, and certainly not a *Guix* power
> user.
>
> [...]
>
> Personally, I think it’s a good idea to default to having /usr/bin/env
> shebangs just work on Guix Systems.
>
> [...]
>
> With the same reasoning we could argue against having coreutils on PATH.
> This is not an exaggeration: R depended on coreutils to be on PATH at
> runtime and we only found out when we ran it in a container without
> coreutils.

I agree.  At first, I thought I could do without /usr/bin/env, but I
always end up installing it because scripts that others share with me
frequently use it, and it's just too painful to have to patch them all
or package up those scripts in Guix package definitions.  I encounter
scrips like this frequently enough that I've decided I want
/usr/bin/env.

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Like I wrote in <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/35910#2> and in the
> message it refers to, although I was initially mildly reluctant to
> having /usr/bin/env by default, I’ve come to think that lack of
> /usr/bin/env is a gratuitous annoyance—not to me of course, but to
> newcomers as we’ve seen repeatedly, be they seasoned GNU/Linux users or
> not.
>
> With that in mind, adding /usr/bin/env by default is probably a good move.
>
> Now, we can add a snippet in the manual with the ‘modify-services’ trick
> to remove /usr/bin/env.  :-)
>
> [...]
>
> Well anyway, if we take a step back, we’re talking about a really tiny
> issue in the grand scheme of things, and it’s certainly not worth losing
> our hair over it.  :-)

I feel the same way.

Regardless of how we came to discuss it, I'm glad we've discussed the
issue in this email thread, and I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in
changing my mind about /usr/bin/env.  It's good to have it by default.

-- 
Chris

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