Re: Multiple profiles with Guix Home

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Am Donnerstag, dem 05.05.2022 um 18:42 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> Liliana Marie Prikler schreef op do 05-05-2022 om 18:31 [+0200]:
> > > I am not debating any legitimacy (<home-profile> is not some
> > > government), I am discussing the reasons, and whether some of the
> > > features (e.g. faster profile building) can be implemented more
> > > generally (not Guix Home-exclusive), without manual
> > > configuration.
> > I think you're misunderstanding cause and effect here.  For small
> > n, O(n) = O(1).
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here, what cause and what effect are you
> referring to here?  And I'm not sure what the connection between ‘for
> small n, O(n) = O(1)’ and the previous sentences is (I guess
> something about profile building times and small profiles -> fast
> building, but I don't see any connection to cause and effect ...)?
You get the fast builds because you have small inputs to union-build. 
You can't get small inputs to union-build without splitting your
profile and if everything goes into one profile, you need union-build
in the end.

> > If some reasons remain (e.g. tidyness of separated thematic
> > profiles), _those_ reasons could be a good reason for <home-
> > profile> or the like.  What I'd like to avoid, is avoiding extra
> > complexity for the wrong reasons, and only adding it for the right
> > reasons.  To reiterate, the primary reason for using Guix Home to
> > manage multiple profiles is so that we can manage multiple profiles
> > in a declarative manner.
> 
> Multiple profiles can already be managed in a declarative manner:
> "guix shell -m manifest.scm".  I'd say that Guix Home adds some
> impurity (‘guix home reconfigure’ installs/removes/replaces some
> symlinks in $HOME, which is a form of mutation).  Though maybe some
> people want to keep all their manifests together and don't mind the
> little extra mutation?
We're not talking about the same kind of profile management here.  By
profile management I mean creating, updating, modifying and deleting a
profile that has the same basic properties as ~/.guix-profile or
~/.guix-home.  Shell profiles are not that.

Cheers