Package recommended environment variables

Package recommended environment variables

[Tk]

When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding variables to .profile .
These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch of stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info again? Should I grep through package definitions?

Tk

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Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Amirouche]

On 2019-05-16 11:25, Tk wrote:
> When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding variables
> to .profile .
> These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch of
> stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info again?
> Should I grep through package definitions?
> 

$ guix package --search-paths

export 
PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/bin:/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/sbin"
export 
GUILE_LOAD_PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/share/guile/site/2.2"
export 
GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/lib/guile/2.2/site-ccache"
export INFOPATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/share/info"

Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

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Tk,

Tk wrote:
> When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding 
> variables to .profile .

Which warnings are these?  Are you sure that's what they mean?

Something like ‘the following variable definitions might be 
needed’ doesn't mean you should go edit your .profile, but you're 
far from the first to do so.  They are printed because guix cannot 
change the environment of the shell that invoked it, so ‘guix 
install foo; foo’ won't work if foo needs a certain environment 
variable to be set.  It will work if you open a new shell.  That's 
a Unix limitation¹.

There was some talk about rephrasing that warning, but IIRC that 
was difficult to do without making other assumptions.  I don't 
know if anything came of it.

> These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch 
> of stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info 
> again? Should I grep through package definitions?

Grepping won't help since these variables (‘search paths’) are 
almost always propagated from dependencies, such as glib.  Take a 
look at the ‘--search-paths’ argument to ‘guix package’.  It will 
probably do what you want.  Note that it's not limited to a single 
package.

However, why are you interested in this information?

- If it's because you're manually adding variables to .profile: 
  don't; Guix already takes care of this automatically, you should 
  simply source <guix-profile>/etc/profile if you aren't already.

- If it's because you're using an incompatible shell and are 
  maintaining your own ‘port’ of that file: you're *probably* 
  better off with a simple ‘bash -c ". guix-profile/etc/profile && 
  exec myshell"’ wrapper.

- If it's because Guix's …/etc/profile is otherwise lacking for 
  you, please let us know why.

Kind regards,

T G-R

[1]: There are horrible ways to fake this but let's not.

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Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Tk]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, 16 May 2019 13:21, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> wrote:

> Tk,
>
> Tk wrote:
>
> > When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding > variables to .profile .
>
> Which warnings are these? Are you sure that's what they mean?
>
> Something like ‘the following variable definitions might be needed’ doesn't mean you should go edit your .profile, but you're far from the first to do so. They are printed because guix cannot change the environment of the shell that invoked it, so ‘guix install foo; foo’ won't work if foo needs a certain environment variable to be set. It will work if you open a new shell. That's a Unix limitation¹.
>
> There was some talk about rephrasing that warning, but IIRC that was difficult to do without making other assumptions. I don't know if anything came of it.
>
> > These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch > of stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info > again? Should I grep through package definitions?
>
> Grepping won't help since these variables (‘search paths’) are almost always propagated from dependencies, such as glib. Take a look at the ‘--search-paths’ argument to ‘guix package’. It will probably do what you want. Note that it's not limited to a single package.
>
> However, why are you interested in this information?
>
> -   If it's because you're manually adding variables to .profile: don't; Guix already takes care of this automatically, you should simply source <guix-profile>/etc/profile if you aren't already.
>
> -   If it's because you're using an incompatible shell and are maintaining your own ‘port’ of that file: you're probably better off with a simple ‘bash -c ". guix-profile/etc/profile && exec myshell"’ wrapper.
> -   If it's because Guix's …/etc/profile is otherwise lacking for you, please let us know why.
>
>     Kind regards,
>
>     T G-R
>
>     [1]: There are horrible ways to fake this but let's not.
>

Hi Tobias and others,

Thanks for the responses. First of all, I am using the Guix distro, not guix inside 3rd party GNU\Linux distribution.

At first, it looked to me like I do not need to touch anything, however there were few times when I had to export those variables manually, probably because of the Unix limitation that you  mentioned. Unfortunately I do not remember where I hit this and if I ever executed a login shell to check this.

Except PATH, there are other environment variables needed by, for example, R, or Python, or Git. These also get mentioned in the warnings. Are they also automatically set and sourced once I enter another login shell?

Cheers,

Todor

Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Jeff Bauer]

I've put the following in my .profile:

GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.guix-profile"
if [ -d $GUIX_PROFILE ] || [ -h $GUIX_PROFILE ] ; then
    export GUIX_PROFILE
    export GUIX_LOCPATH=$GUIX_PROFILE/lib/locale/
    source $GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile
fi

I have it set up this way so my .profile is portable
between guix and non-guix systems.  GUIX_LOCPATH was
added to get rid of warning messages.

Any suggestions for improvements are welcome.  Thanks.

-Jeff

Re: Package recommended environment variables

[ison]

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but don't these always get placed into
~/.guix-profile/etc/profile
Right now mine seems almost identical to the output of
guix package --search-paths
with the only difference being that the values in that file are prepended to the
existing ones. Therefore all you should have to do to ensure you always have the
right vars is to just source that file.

I have this in my ~/.profile and as far as I can tell it always gives me any
vars that guix tells me to set

[[ -f /etc/profile ]] && source /etc/profile
[[ -f ${HOME}/.guix-profile/etc/profile ]] && source ${HOME}/.guix-profile/etc/profile

Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Tk <tk.code@protonmail.com> writes:

> Except PATH, there are other environment variables needed by, for
> example, R, or Python, or Git. These also get mentioned in the
> warnings. Are they also automatically set and sourced once I enter
> another login shell?

Those that are mentioned by Guix: yes.

There are other variables that are mentioned in the application setup
section of the manual that may be required e.g. for SSL when using R.
Due to limitations in Guix they may not necessarily be automatically
set.

--
Ricardo

Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Amirouche <amirouche@hyper.dev> writes:

> On 2019-05-16 11:25, Tk wrote:
>> When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding variables
>> to .profile .
>> These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch of
>> stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info again?
>> Should I grep through package definitions?
>>
>
> $ guix package --search-paths
>
> export
> PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/bin:/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/sbin"
> export
> GUILE_LOAD_PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/share/guile/site/2.2"
> export
> GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/lib/guile/2.2/site-ccache"
> export INFOPATH="/home/amirouche/.guix-profile/share/info"

That’s one way.  Another is to look at the Guix profile’s “etc/profile” file.

-- 
Ricardo