Re: Package Installation Queries

[Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com>]

Niall Dooley (2017-02-09 22:36 +0100) wrote:

> On 8 February 2017 at 21:51, Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>> > (1) When I installed magit, v2.8.0 was installed instead of the
>> > v2.10.1 listed on hydra. Is this a bug or an error on my part?
>>
>> You probably didn't run "guix pull", so you installed the old magit (and
>> you will continue to install the old packages until you run "guix pull").
>
> I see but how often does one need to run 'guix pull' to ensure they install
> the latest available packages. Running it now installs guix as explained in
> the manual but it doesn't explain how often one needs to run it.

I don't know, it's up to you to decide how often :-)
"guix pull" just fetches and builds the latest Guix git snapshot, and as
you can guess Guix git tree is updated all the time.  Someone does "guix
pull" daily, someone weekly.  As for me, I'm not fancy of frequent
updates, sometimes I don't update packages for months (but it's not a
good practice).

[...]
>> > (3) Before installing Guix I used SCP as my font for Emacs. However,
>> > following the installation of SCP via Guix some unicode glyphs are
>> > not rendered correctly as they were before. Note, I did a fresh
>> > install of my foreign distro before installing Guix and did not
>> > re-install SCP on it. Is there further steps I need to perform to
>> > have these unicode glyphs rendered correctly?
>>
>> What unicode symbols are not displayed correctly for you?  If I
>> understood correctly, SCP is a font and you installed it with Guix,
>> right?  What name does this (SCP) package have in Guix?
>
> Yes, sorry SCP := Source Code Pro, and yes I've installed it via Guix using
> Guix package name font-adobe-source-code-pro. Examples of unicode
> characters which were displaying correctly before but not now include:
> U+232B, U+2326, U+23CE. Reading about this subject some more
> these characters may not in fact be available in SCP but were rather supplied
> by another available font.

Yeah, I think these chars are not supported by this font.  Emacs
displays U+232B and U+2326 with "Symbola" font for me, and U+23CE is
unrecognized (Symbola and any other font I have do not support it).

BTW Symbola package can't be a part of Guix due to a really stupid
license problem.  If you are interested, I have a Guix package for this
font here:

  https://github.com/alezost/guix-config/blob/master/packages/fonts.scm

> It seems Emacs maintains font mappings on
> a per-glyph basis, meaning that multiple fonts are used at the same time
> (transparently) to display any character for which you have a font
> (source: https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts). So I guess before
> there was other fonts available to Emacs that I didn't necessarily configure.

I think this is case, and I know that Emacs tries to use "Symbola" font
for many ranges of chars including (#x2322 . #x23FF) as you can see with
"M-x find-library fontset" (search for "Symbola" there).

-- 
Alex