Guix home packages and garbage collection

[Trev <trev@trevdev.ca>]

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Hey There,

I am not sure if I have some sort of bug, or if this is how guix home is
intended to work. The short problem that I am having is that every time
I do a guix gc, the next time I feel the need to do a guix home
reconfigure for some petty change such as an environment variable, guix
feels the need to download all of my packages and re-compile the
packages that are built from source.

I am feeling like garbage collection, or guix home are more trouble than
they're worth as I have to sit there for 30+ minutes just to see if some
small thing in my profile has changed.

Based on the wonderful help from the people in IRC I had thought:

1. It doesn't matter if I install using guix package or guix home, the
links to the relevant derivations should remain the same. Whether this
has any bearing on my "problem" remains to be seen.

2. Unless some package is needed for the "building", it should have
little bearing on the currently installed package state. This is to say,
guix home reconfigure should not re-download and build packages ad
nauseam just because guix gc cleared some build dependencies for
packages that are already installed and working.

3. Perhaps grafts have something to do with this, but I have done tests
in rapid succession to reproduce the problem. I think maybe grafts
haven't had a chance to be seen after a fresh guix pull prior to
replicating the problem.

Acting on some troubleshooting advice I had deleted my profiles for my
user, and garbage collected everything. I then ran a guix pull and and a
guix home reconfigure to restore my user from my current configuration
with a clean slate. There are no packages installed with guix package at
this point, and no guix package generations. The "problem" still
persists.

May I get some idea as to whether or not I have an actual problem with
guix home here or if this is the current intended side-effect of guix gc
with packages installed via guix home? This way I can migrate away from
guix home and leave that alone until it matures, or perhaps just opt
out.

Thank you for the amazing software!

-- 

Trev : 0FB7 D06B 4A2A F07E AD5B  1169 183B 6306 8AA1 D206

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