Guix home migration

Guix home migration

[Ryan Prior]

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Migrating application settings to guix-home is something we want to make really approachable. Right now it's a relatively new and little-known feature but it could quickly become one of the top use cases for Guix, as a lot of people are interested in declarative application configuration.

A free software project to look at for ideas is Mackup: https://github.com/lra/mackup
Its strategy is unsophisticated: it moves your configuration files to a synchronized directory in Dropbox (or similar) and replaces it with a symlink. But it's got a great migration story: you run `mackup backup' and it scans for config files for hundreds of applications [1] and automatically migrates them.

Whether or not we would want the exact same experience, the overall vision of a single migration command that scans for dotfiles and adds them to your guix home is something we can aspire to.

[1]: https://github.com/lra/mackup/tree/master/mackup/applications

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Re: Guix home migration

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Ryan Prior <rprior@protonmail.com> skribis:

> A free software project to look at for ideas is Mackup: https://github.com/lra/mackup
> Its strategy is unsophisticated: it moves your configuration files to a synchronized directory in Dropbox (or similar) and replaces it with a symlink. But it's got a great migration story: you run `mackup backup' and it scans for config files for hundreds of applications [1] and automatically migrates them.
>
> Whether or not we would want the exact same experience, the overall vision of a single migration command that scans for dotfiles and adds them to your guix home is something we can aspire to.

This is the intent behind ‘guix home import’.  It doesn’t take care of
“everything” at this moment, but at least it ensures users don’t start
with a blank page.

If you have ideas of things that the command should handle as a
priority, you’re welcome to share!

Thanks,
Ludo’.