Re: Collect guix profiles in single directory.

[Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at>]

On Fri, 2020-01-31 at 13:04 +0100, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> > The thing with XDG_CONFIG_HOME and config-directory is, that it
> > doesn't
> > allow me to set config-directory directly AND requires all other
> > configuration to be put in the new XDG_CONFIG_HOME as well.  I
> > personally wouldn't mind reading all profiles from config-
> > directory,
> > but I would like a way to set that to ~/.guix.
> 
> Make sense, we need to define a GUIX_CONFIG_HOME that expands to
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME/guix by default.
Which would mean adding an (override #f) to xdg-directory and adding
#:override (getenv "GUIX_CONFIG_HOME") to config-directory.
Then we'd only have to move ~/.guix-profile to (config-
directory)/default and rename current to channels.

What would we do for backwards compatibility in this case?  Keep the
~/.guix-profile and (config-directory)/current symlink until the user
removes it, perhaps sourcing them twice?

> > > By time creation/modification?
> > mtime will cause weird bugs if you do single upgrades of profiles. 
> > ctime may be acceptable, depending on how familiar one is with
> > touch,
> > but I'd personally prefer reverse alphabetical because it is the
> > easiest to understand.
> 
> To be clear, I think we need to speak in terms of priority: should
> "a"
> have higher priority than "z" or the other way around?
"z" before "a".  Guix profiles prepend paths, so the result will have
e.g. a/bin:z/bin.