Re: GUIX_LOCPATH in daemon unit file

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> skribis:

> Hi Thomas,
>
>> using Guix on Ubuntu, I kept seeing messages “substitute: warning: 
>> failed to install locale: Invalid argument” (though apart from this 
>> warning, everything seemed to work normally).
>>
>>  From a previous thread on this mailing list, I learnt that the 
>>  problem is that the daemon doesn't have GUIX_LOCPATH set correctly, 
>>  but I didn't know how to fix
>> this. #guix explained to me that, for systemd users, this can be done 
>> by adding "Environment=GUIX_LOCPATH=/root/.guix-profile/lib/locale" 
>> to the [Service] section of the guix-daemon.service file. (and 
>> probably also installing the necessary locales for root, which I'd 
>> already done).
>>
>> Should this environment setting be added to the default 
>> guix-daemon.service, or could this break something for other 
>> users/distributions (I'm not sure systems other than Ubuntu have this 
>> problem?).
>
> I think GUIX_LOCPATH should be set automatically.  There are no ill
> effects of having it set when the directory doesn’t exist AFAIK.  Also,
> only Guix honours GUIX_LOCPATH (hence the name), so it shouldn’t screw
> up the behaviour of other applications.
>
> This is a problem on all systems where Guix is used as a package
> manager.
>
> What do others think?  If it’s okay and my rationalisations above are
> not mistaken I’d like to accept this change.

I agree, please push.

Besides, I wonder if we should add ‘glibc-utf8-locales’ to the binary
tarball.  It would add a few MiBs to the tarball, and would only “work”
for people who use one of the few locales it provides; OTOH, that’s
already an improvement for these users.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Ludo’.