Re: Package recommended environment variables

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr>]

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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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