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Re: Guix home package confusion
From: |
Gary Johnson |
Subject: |
Re: Guix home package confusion |
Date: |
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 09:48:54 -0400 |
Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq <sebastien.rey-coyrehourcq@univ-rouen.fr> writes:
> Hi,
>
> Happy to see i'm not alone, a little lost when jumping into the guix
> home bath ;)
>
> I think there is something to do (a schema, a table ?) to better
> visualize relation between guix home, guix system, guix install, guix
> package for the beginer. That could help a lot when you start your
> workflow from scratch and you don't know how thing relate each others.
>
> A list with dotfile shared by others, like sqrtminus / dominicm could
> also help (copy / pasting and learning from others).
>
> Best regards
>
> Src
This has been an interesting thread, and I'm glad the OP eventually
worked out a solution for using these tools together.
In my setup, I use these three approaches:
1. guix system
Installs global packages, runs system services, and creates
everything in my filesystem outside of /home/$USER.
2. guix home
Installs local packages for $USER, runs user services, and creates
all of my dotfiles in /home/$USER, including my shell config files
(i.e., .bashrc, .bash_profile, .bash_logout).
3. guix package w/ manifests
Installs local packages for $USER in package groups. For example, I
place emacs and all of its packages into a manifest called emacs.scm,
which is installed into my emacs profile. I make similar
manifest/profile pairs for all the groups of packages on my system.
Here are my current manifests (chromium, emacs, flatpak, matterhorn,
media, network, programming, qgis, sysutils, texlive, wine). I then
have a script that loops over all of my manifests and updates each
profile whenever I run `guix pull`.
There are (at least) two advantages to this approach over using `guix
package` without manifests:
1. If `guix weather` indicates that no binary substitute exists yet
for a large package like ungoogled-chromium, qgis, texlive, or
wine, I can simply upgrade all of my other profiles now and wait
until a substitute is available before upgrading the large
package's profile.
2. If one package fails to build, only its profile doesn't get
upgraded. All of my other profiles can still be upgraded
successfully. Then I can go about debugging the broken package at
my leisure (or wait until the next `guix pull` fixes it) and just
worry about rebuilding the one upgraded profile at that time.
The main thing to remember when working with Guix is that no matter
which method you use to install a package, it will only be built and
installed once into /gnu/store as long as you are using the same guix
revision (or the same revisions of a particular combination of channels)
and the same package definition.
The different installation commands (guix system, guix home, guix
package) just create your profile directory (containing symlinks back to
/gnu/store) in different places on your filesystem.
To see the packages installed via `guix system`, use this:
guix package --profile=/var/guix/profiles/system/profile -I
To see the packages installed via `guix home`, use this:
guix package --profile=$HOME/.guix-home/profile -I
To see the packages installed via `guix package` without manifests, use
this:
guix package -I
or if you want to be explicit:
guix package --profile=$HOME/.guix-profile -I
To see the packages installed via `guix package` with manifests, use
this:
guix package --profile=$PATH_TO_YOUR_PROFILE -I
Hopefully by now the pattern should be apparent. ;)
The truly IMPORTANT thing to keep in mind when using multiple profiles
is that you have to add them to your login shell's PATH, MANPATH, and
INFOPATH environment variables in order to actually be able to use (and
read documentation about) the packages they contain.
I source the following script in my ~/.bash_profile for this purpose:
```
#!/bin/sh
GUIX_PROFILES=$PATH_TO_YOUR_PROFILES_DIRECTORY
for dir in $GUIX_PROFILES/*
do
name=$(basename "$dir")
profile=$dir/$name
if [ -f "$profile"/etc/profile ]
then
GUIX_PROFILE="$profile"
. "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile
export MANPATH="$GUIX_PROFILE/share/man${MANPATH:+:}$MANPATH"
export INFOPATH="$GUIX_PROFILE/share/info${INFOPATH:+:}$INFOPATH"
fi
unset profile
unset name
done
```
I hope this info helps someone out there improve their Guix
configuration. That's all I've got for now, so have fun and happy
hacking!
~Gary
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