Such a mechanism already exists for GDM and SLiM, see later (though it doesn't create ~/.xessionrc, it's more stateless, and it is independent of Guix Home). I don't see why Guix Home should handle things, it doesn't seem to have anything to handle (unless you go for the alternative, more stateful, solution you are proposing?).It's a tricky question, because it's a case on the edge of Home/System. From one point of view it should be handled by some home service, which will create a proper ~/.xsession or extend it and generic mechanism,
from some display managers will automatically source it, but on the other hand maybe adjusting system services for other DMs, which doesn't work "out of the box" yet is a way to go. I don't have much experience with X11, and don't see a whole picture, so it's hard to tell which option is better.
I think I've found a solution that works for Guix System, independent of Guix Home (doesn't depend on Guix Home and doesn't interfere with Guix Home and doesn't require Guix System and Guix Home to interact), as written in another response (thread is getting a bit long!):
On 22-07-2022 12:24, Maxime Devos wrote:
retitle 56661 SDDM does not do the equivalent of 'login shell --login', unlike other login managers
thanks
A digged a little, and found that:
For GDM, things work, for SDDM, they don't.
There is a 'xinitrc' procedure in gnu/services/xorg.scm that generates a configuration file that has a fallback .xsession that does a --login. This is used by gdm-wayland-session-wrapper, <gdm-configuration> and slim-shepherd-service. However, nothing similar appears to be done for SDDM. So it appears that the SDDM service needs to be tweaked to use xinitrc or such.
It appears that SDDM supports xinitrc files, but it looks for them (see data/scripts/Xsession) in $HOME/.xsessionrc and /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d, which do not exist in Guix. There is no option for overriding the xinitrc. However, it is possible to override the Xsession script used, so we can give SDDM a modified Xsession script that uses Guix' xinitrc.
TBC: the 'xinitrc' that Guix generates does not override the ~/.xinitrc written by the user (if any) -- IIUC, the generated wrapper looks for ~/.xinitrc and if it exists, it runs that, but if it doesn't exist, it has a fallback. Also, TBC, it doesn't create ~/.xsessionrc (unlike what you seem to be proposing), the relevant code just tells the login manager to look at /gnu/store/...-the-generated-xinitrc.
It seems to work for GDM and presumably also for SLiM, which has
similar code. As such, I would expect it to work without problems
for SDDM as well (please write SDDM in the subject line, the
original SLiM is incorrect, I actually used SDDM).
Greetings,
Maxime