Re: Multiple profiles with Guix Home

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

Am Mittwoch, dem 04.05.2022 um 22:41 +0200 schrieb Maxime Devos:
> 
> > I personally have my Guix profile already split
> > across several manifests, that could easily fit into separate
> > profiles if Guix didn't make working with those an absolute pain.
> 
> ... but separate profiles = separate manifests (except when using
> "guix install")?
This implication really only goes one way, i.e. separate profiles
require separate manifests.  Not that you can't specify multiple
manifests in one file, for instance, ...

> > 
> > > And if I'm not the target audience, what does that matter?
> > It matters because it makes part of your complaint basically "fuck
> > your use case, mine's already satisfied" (pardon my French).
> 
> This was not my complaint.  There are a lot of cool use cases there,
> though for whatever reason they were not mentioned in the original e-
> mail, so I had to ask what the use cases were.  And FWIW, mine is not
> satisfied, profile building is still occassionally a bit on the slow
> side.
> 
> What is my concern, is that most use cases I have seen mentioned seem
> like they can be addressed without extra configuration or records or
> manual steps and independently of Guix Home: slow union-build -> make
> it faster (linear or at least O(n lg n)), per-project packages -> use
> "guix shell -m manifest.scm", things change after "guix pull" -> Guix
> Home doesn't solve this(?).  
You are still debating the legitimacy of splitting ~/.guix-profile and
I don't want to entertain that discussion longer than it's worth.  Just
trust me that there are people, like myself, who *want* to split them.

> So except for ‘guix shell maybe doesn't create GC roots sufficiently
> often’ and ‘keep things tidy and separate’ (though the latter appears
> to be already done by "guix shell"?), I don't see why we need some
> Guix Home-specific manual configuration and complexity when we can
> have some automatic general optimisations instead.
> 
> > As for the other point, which is tangential issues remaining, those
> > deserve fixing too, but they're not the point of this debate. 
> > Particularly w.r.t. evaluating search paths across multiple
> > profiles, we already have an instance of that even without allowing
> > users to specify multiple profiles easily.  Thus we not only can
> > think about them as different matters, we should even derive
> > solutions that work outside the context of guix home!
> 
> I don't understand this paragraph, weren't these issues the whole
> reason for introducing this manual configuration thing?  (And the
> thematic profile, which is not tangential IIUC.)
No, the issues I'm describing is that certain things break when you use
a different profile at all.  For instance, you can't build a font
profile, because both Guix Homeless and Guix Home assume that you're
using their blessed profile to store fonts in.  Such issues can be
solved through configuration, i.e. allowing the user to specify "this
is my font profile and it has fonts".

Cheers