Re: Suggestion for a guix shell feature.

[Ekaitz Zarraga <ekaitz@elenq.tech>]

On 2023-12-29 04:58, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Apoorv via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution."
> <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>> I want to make a suggestion for a feature for guix shell.
>>
>> I was recently writing guix.scm files for my projects and was having
>> problem with the libraries I added, not being found inside the
>> shell. After struggling for hours I finally learned that that the
>> LD_LIBRARY_PATH  is not being updated automatically inside the  guix
>> shell environment so the libraries can be found easily.
>>
>> So my feature suggestion is that maybe we can have a flag or a option
>> for guix shell, something like --add-ld-path or --update-ld-path for
>> example, to add all libraries specified in the guix.scm or even as
>> sub-command guix shell --add-ld-path mesa as an example, to
>> automatically update the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to
>> contain the correct paths to these libraries so they can be found
>> easily inside the shell.
> 
> Guix doesn't/shouldn't make use of LD_LIBRARY_PATH, except in rare cases
> to wrap binaries.  It's better to patch the dlopen calls to use the
> absolute shared library file name.
> 
> Perhaps you are missing the package configuring LIBRARY_PATH and other
> useful environment variables for finding libraries?  That'd be
> gcc-toolchain, if I recall correctly.
> 

Hi,

I have a similar issue. I have a project that links GLFW statically, but 
I still need to use its dependencies, like x11 and so on. If I make a 
shell like:

	guix shell -D glfw

I don't have access to those libraries, but they are in my GUIX_PROFILE.
The only way to access them is setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It doesn't 
matter if I have `gcc-toolchain` installed or not. Why is this?
The search path is hardcoded in the statically built GLFW?
How can we make this usecase simpler (mostly for development)?

Thanks,
Ekaitz