Re: Guix home and operating-system

[Andrew Tropin]

On 2022-07-06 11:20, Tissevert wrote:

> Hi Guix,
>
> I'm finally having some time to try and put guix on the older machines at home
> and thought I'd start by generating a live CD to show the rest of the family
> what that would look like without having to make any irreversible changes yet.
>
> Meanwhile, as this is a time to clean and rationalize system declarations to
> ease maintaining the various machines, I thought it would be an appropriate
> time to try and start learning about guix home (I came to guix for the
> reproducibility, I'm not going to spend hours on each machine reproducing the
> same user config !).
>
> To my greatest astonishment, I found no way to make guix home configurations
> interact with operating-system declarations. I expected something along the
> lines of a "configuration" or "home" field in the user-account data type, 
> which
> could contain directly a valid guix home configuration or maybe the path to a
> file containing one. At least, I expected to find a "packages" field to allow
> specifying the packages set for a particular user. This is of course necessary
> when building a read-only live image which won't be able to receive
> modification at a later time. More generally, this raised a question in me: 
> why
> go to such length to have a whole declarative system which you can generate in
> advance on each aspect, and then require to launch (stateful !) command lines
> at a later time to alter the configuration of users.
>
> I was discussing that the other night with @unmatched-paren on IRC and was 
> told
> this could be an interesting idea so what do you think ? Is there a good 
> reason
> why this hasn't been implemented ? Would it be very complicated to run the
> equivalent of a guix home at the end of the system generation ? I'd be
> personally interested to work on such a feature but I have absolutely no idea
> where to start and would be glad to receive some pointers if it was deemed
> useful enough that I should spend my time on it.
>
> Now I can think of several ways to do that differently: I suppose the live CD
> could have a system service performing the call to guix home to setup the
> user's environment during the boot. Also, this would not cover user services
> but regarding file configurations, I can think of a way because I'm prone to
> config vertigo these days: there are so many levels where we can alter the
> config, why always delay it ? Packages often contain a default configuration,
> and upon start the program checks half a dozen places for a custom user 
> config:
> in other words why have a bash profile in my home when I could generate a bash
> package which has directly my dream profile in its "default" version in /etc ?
> I could still use ~/.bash_profile for a temporary tweak. Is that something
> people in guix do frequently ? Why ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tissevert
>

Hi Alice!

This topic was discussed a few times already, but still not yet
implemented.  Probably the last one was "Guix system with
home-environment" in help-guix mailing list.

I played around with it, did some changes to Guix Home (maybe some small
patches not yet upstreamed, but they are not critical IIRC), but didn't
finish the implementation and postpone it again, still think it's really
valuable feature.

I don't remember all the details and where I stopped, but the highlevel
idea is following:

- Define a system services, which contains (user . home-environment) pairs.
- Build home environments on system reconfigure.
- Activate home environments on boot.

Here are some WIP half an year old code for guix-home-service-type:

home.scm
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-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

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