Re: Multiple profiles with Guix Home

[Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be>]

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Liliana Marie Prikler schreef op wo 04-05-2022 om 20:38 [+0200]:
> Am Mittwoch, dem 04.05.2022 um 09:01 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> > I have seen that blog post.  I do use profiles, albeit with "guix
> > environment" and now "guix shell".  But I have not yet seen any
> > reasons for profile _splitting_.  
> That's nice for you, but don't take that to mean that no one has any
> reason to do so ever. 

I don't.

> I personally have my Guix profile already split
> across several manifests, that could easily fit into separate profiles
> if Guix didn't make working with those an absolute pain.

... but separate profiles = separate manifests (except when using "guix
install")?

> > And if I'm not the target audience, what does that matter?
> It matters because it makes part of your complaint basically "fuck your
> use case, mine's already satisfied" (pardon my French).

This was not my complaint.  There are a lot of cool use cases there,
though for whatever reason they were not mentioned in the original e-
mal, so I had to ask what the use cases were.  And FWIW, mine is not
satisfied, profile building is still occassionally a bit on the slow
side.

What is my concern, is that most use cases I have seen mentioned seem
like they can be addressed without extra configuration or records or
manual steps and independently of Guix Home: slow union-build -> make
it faster (linear or at least O(n lg n)), per-project packages -> use
"guix shell -m manifest.scm", things change after "guix pull" -> Guix
Home doesn't solve this(?).  

So except for ‘guix shell maybe doesn't create GC roots sufficiently
often’ and ‘keep things tidy and separate’ (though the latter appears
to be already done by "guix shell"?), I don't see why we need some Guix
Home-specific manual configuration and complexity when we can have some
automatic general optimisations instead.

> As for the
> other point, which is tangential issues remaining, those deserve fixing
> too, but they're not the point of this debate.  Particularly w.r.t.
> evaluating search paths across multiple profiles, we already have an
> instance of that even without allowing users to specify multiple
> profiles easily.  Thus we not only can think about them as different
> matters, we should even derive solutions that work outside the context
> of guix home!

I don't understand this paragraph, weren't these issues the whole
reason for introducing this manual configuration thing?  (And the
thematic profile, which is not tangential IIUC.)

Greetings,
Maxime

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