Re: Initialization of environment variables for guix on foreign distro

[Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com>]

Hello David,

David Lecompte <david.lecompte@metani.info> writes:
> On Trisquel with mate on my laptop, when opening a mate terminal (the
> command is just "mate-terminal", no option), all the suitable
> environment variables for guix are set.
>
> On Debian with mate on my desktop (I had problems with Trisquel that I
> could not solve for one year so I am using Debian), when opening a mate
> terminal, the suitable variables for guix are not set.

I had a similar issue recently on my Ubuntu laptop, when I switched the
display manager from SDDM to GDM. From what I gather, the latter
launches the desktop session without using a shell so at no point the
shell initialization files are evaluated and thus the environment isn’t set 
up as usual.

I use KDE Plasma, and it has a mechanism to evaluate shell scripts to
set the environment, so in my case to fix the problem what I had to do
was:

$ ln -s /etc/profile ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/profile.sh

I searched a bit, but unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent
solution for MATE.

I suppose one alternative would be to switch from GDM to SDDM. :-)

> Does guix configure another file to set environment variables properly
> or is /etc/profile.d/guix.sh the only one? Is it supposed to be
> sufficient to source it via /etc/profile?

Yes, that should be enough.

> If sourcing /etc/profile is supposed to address all cases, what is the
> recommended way to have it sourced? (on the laptop, I searched all .*
> files in my home directory, none of them is sourcing /etc/profile).
> That last question is not guix-specific but any advice is still
> welcome.

bash automatically reads /etc/profile when invoked as a login shell.
There are more details here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Startup-Files.html

-- 
Thanks,
Thiago