Re: “Guix Profiles in Practice”

[Tanguy Le Carrour <tanguy@bioneland.org>]

Hi Pierre, Hi Guix!

Thanks for your article! It's been really useful!

I have two rather simple questions:
#1. why put the profile in `"$GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES"/my-project/my-project`
    instead of `"$GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES"/my-project`? I tried to create 2
    profiles right under `"$GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES"`, and it seems to work!
#2. how can I remove a profile?! … actually, I figured out that removing
    the links works. Garbage would be (magically) collected on the next
    `guix gc` ("removing stale link from…").

Is point #2 the reason why the profiles are stored in subfolders?! If
yes, I would use `"$GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES"/my-project/current` instead.
Does it make sense?!
Does point #2 deserve a mention in the cookbook?

My actual concern with profiles comes from the fact that I'm a Fish [1]
user. So I cannot "just" source the profile. Work-arounds exist [2],
but I don't quite like them. The good thing is I'm also a direnv [3] user
and this solves the problem it a neat way!
I'm working on a direnv function (`use profile my-project`) that would activate
the profile whenever I `cd` to a project folder.
I will eventually submit it upstream, but first, I have to figure out a way
to keep fish and direnv available when I activate a profile, because PATH
is overwritten and those packages are not in my profile! :-(

[1]: https://fishshell.com
[2]: https://github.com/edc/bass
[3]: https://direnv.net

This brings me to my last (but not quite related) question… where does
`--search-paths` get its information from? I guess it's something in the
package definition that tells it "you have to export PYTHONPATH", but
I'm not sure where. Any clue welcome!

Anyway, thanks again for your work on the article!

-- 
Tanguy