Re: The tricky case of "--localstatedir=/var"

[Jookia <166291@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 01:15:17AM -0800, Chris Marusich wrote:
> It looks like the decision to explicitly set localstatedir to "/var" in
> the guix package was made in commit 2d195e67 by Ludo. Perhaps he can
> explain what his intent was.

That'd be nice. I'm sure there's a reason which could be helpful in figuring out
how to fix this issue.

> I understand why you would want to do "guix environment guix" (e.g., to
> get the dependencies for guix so you can build it), but I'm curious: why
> would you want to do "guix package -i guix"? This is a bit of a
> digression, but I'm curious to know why one might want do that.

Well, in my case (and a lot of cases as evident by the people running in to this
exact issue) is that we compile Guix from source instead of using the official
binaries, then install Guix so it's managed by Guix. The advantage to this is
that we have all the dependencies for Guix inside the store rather than in, say,
Debian's package manager. This is also needed in the case you want to bootstrap
and install to a disk or build virtual machines containing Guix.

> - Chris

Jookia.