On 2022-05-24 20:31, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote: > Hi, > > Am Dienstag, dem 24.05.2022 um 14:55 +0300 schrieb Andrew Tropin: >> On 2022-05-23 19:05, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote: >> > [...] >> > I don't think I agree with this choice.  To satisfy both my own use >> > case of serving profiles in different locations from another and >> > another issue being raised w.r.t. configuring the location of the >> > .guix-home profile, I think we should make a triple of location, >> > optional short name, and manifest (which may be generated from >> > packages implicitly).  WDYT? >> > >> >> This service is intended for profiles managed by Guix Home, so every >> profile MUST be a part of home-environment (~/.guix-home is a symlink >> to it).  I don't see any meaningful reasons to make it possible to >> customize the path inside home-environment. > Why though? The decision to restrict Guix Home to dotfiles was already > a bad one that has since been overturned, so I think we should > carefully evaluate why "~/.guix-home" even is special. In my point of > view, any path that is prefixed with the user's home ought to be fair > game, as should be constructing intermediate per-user profile symlinks > in /var/guix. It's not bad, it had and has its own goals, pros and cons, I found another design descision, which we think is more intuitive, but still partially serving original goals and we switched to it. The disucssion about ~/.guix-home symlink itself is unrelated to both "dotfiles question" and my original statement. All dot/xdg/other files belong to home-environment and no side-effects are done during the build of home-environment, the only side-effects happens during activation and $HOME touched only by symlink-manager and I would like to keep it to be the case, otherwise we will end up with tons of stateful ad-hoc hacks. That said, I would like to avoid any Guix Home logic to rely on paths outside of home-environment. In case you really need ~/work/my-project/guix-profile to be created for some reason you can extend home-files-service-type and rely on symlink-manager to do this dirty job, but the setup-environment script will still source home-environment/profiles/your-profile-name and won't know anything about ~/work/my-project/guix-profile. >> If you want to have profiles like ~/work/my-project/guix-profile or >> ~/.guix/profiles/my-python-environment managed by Guix Home you can >> implement home-external-profiles-service-type, which can extended >> activation service or any other impure tricks, but I would advice >> against it.  I suggest either manage a profile with >> home-[additional-]-profiles or manage them externally and load with >> home-profile-paths/home-profile-loader. > Pardon me if I was confusing, but I meant to have one service defining > the existence of ~/work/my-project/guix-profile (that being home- > profiles-service-type) and another to load it (that being home-profile- > loader-service-type). Admittedly, the existing way of specifying a > profile that is loaded becomes more work then, so perhaps we can add > some syntactic sugar to that, so that both services get extended at > once. > >> > Considering the above, I think a rough roadmap would be: >> > 1. Implementing home-profiles-service-type (to build the profiles) >> > 2. Implementing home-profile-loader-service-type >> >> This one looks simplier and also independent from #1, so I would >> recommend to start with it.  Also, it's very likely that >> home-profiles-service-type will be extending >> home-profile-loader-service-type > I thought about it for some while, but I really don't think either is > easier than the other, particularly in the way I described it, where > home-profiles-service-type and home-profile-loader-service-type are > orthogonal to each other. > >> > 3. ??? >> > 4. Deprecate the existing home-profile-service-type in favor of the >> > new profile service type pair and/or implement it in terms of it. >> > where (1) and (2) could be done by two people/teams in parallel. >> >> The migration should be quite simple here. >> >> JFYI: The design of Guix Home is flexible, essential services can be >> completely customized, even symlink-manager can be removed or >> substituted with something else (for example to make a read-only home >> workflow proposed by Julien Lepiller in guix-home-manager).  This is >> also used in rde to substitute home-shell-profile-service-type with >> alternative implementation: >> https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/rde/features.scm#L234 > I'm not sure if I'm that fond of this design choice – it reminds me a > bit about OOP horrors I was forced to learn. Anyway, I don't think > it's relevant, as... >> This way you can experiment with multi-profile approach even without >> modifying existing code. > I was planning to run guix home from checkout with $HOME in /tmp anyway > for testing purposes. > >> > Given that the task has been simplified, I think I might start >> > coding on it, but I can't promise any particular deadline.  At the >> > moments both my day job and review work delay any other >> > contributions towards Guix. >> > >> > Cheers >> >> I also advice to treat it as an experiment.  IMO Guix Home should be >> relatively conservative, stable and simple.  Other advanced workflows >> in most cases should be implemented and maintained separately and be >> optionally pluggable in Guix Home by overriding essential services or >> any other way.  In cases such workflows demonstrates their benifits >> without compromising simplicity, they can be included. > I initially planned for the new stuff to be backwards compatible by way > of sanitizers. That probably still works for the design we have > currently, though YMMV. Let's get some initial implementation done and will continue the discussion on more real-life examples. -- Best regards, Andrew Tropin