Re: Can I easily install GNU Emacs 27.1.50 via Guix?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> writes:

> Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au> writes:
>> One may argue that the system is functioning correctly, and this is an
>> unfortunate consequence of the way that Guix works. I would still
>> consider the faulty behaviour a bug - even if it is a result of
>> intentional decisions made in Guix's design. Running evince (i.e.
>> /usr/bin/evince) is failing because of an environment variable that
>> Guix's wrapper sets for emacs. That environment variable is propagated
>> to child processes (as environment variables are), and in this
>> instance that causes the child process to misbehave. This is a bug
>> caused by Guix's wrapping of emacs.
>
> In practical terms: You would expect Guix to rename the environment
> variable and also patch all guix-installed programs so that they use the
> renamed variable without affecting any non-Guix-Program?

Yes.

I agree that the current behaviour is a whole class of bugs that exists
because of confusion between non-Guix binaries and Guix binaries, such
as binary plugins loaded indiscriminately from locations in environment
variables.

It is a difficult but, in my opinion, necessary project, to prefix all
these variables and to patch packages to use the prefixed variables for
augmentation, while also making sense of the unprefixed variables
(e.g. setting PYTHONPATH to make more Python modules available without
having the program use PYTHONPATH by itself).

This is best investigated for each package individually.

The worst offenders in my opinion are the XDG variables and things like
PYTHONPATH, GTK_PATH, etc.

-- 
Ricardo