Re: attempt to create a profile

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On sam., 04 févr. 2023 at 23:36, Kyle Andrews <kyle@posteo.net> wrote:

>>     guix shell -p path/to/some-profile/etc/profile

This command is incorrect and it should read instead,

    guix shell -p path/to/some-profile

but anyway, it was the idea. :-)


> Is it possible to use guix shell to activate multiple existing profiles
> in a particular order to explicitly test for incompatibilities when
> combining profiles?

Well, I am not aware about a way to compose some profiles with “guix
shell”.  Indeed, it should be possible, IMHO.  But I have not checked if
it is technically possible.  Maybe it is already. :-)


> In conclusion, I'm a bit surprised that activating multiple profiles at
> once is so easily found and recommended in the cookbook. It seems to me
> like there are many underemphasized gotchas with respect to
> reproducibility and usability which come from it and as far as I can
> tell, the main developers of Guix do not use it that way. If it is going
> to be recommended as atleast a possibility for advanced users, then it
> would be nice to be able to formally test that usage through ~guix shell~.

I am using multiple profiles and I barely hit collisions.  Given one
specific revision of Guix, collisions should not be possible – it means
something is wrong somewhere with package definition; although, maybe it
is impossible to avoid some collisions with large number of packages,
anyway. :-)

Most of the time, collisions happen when the profile are coming from
different revision of Guix.  And try to combine several profiles from
different revision is, IMHO, some source of troubles impossible to
solve.

That’s said, yes I would also like being able to combine several
profiles and also extend the result.


Cheers,
simon