Re: Package Installation Queries

[Niall Dooley <dooleyn@gmail.com>]

On 8 February 2017 at 21:51, Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Niall Dooley (2017-02-08 17:24 +0100) wrote:
>
> > Firstly, I'm an aspiring programmer/hacker and I've gone straight
> > into the deep end with trying to learn GNU/Linux, Emacs etc. I'm also
> > new to Guix and this community so excuse my ignorance.
>
> Hello and welcome!

Thank you.

> > I've installed Guix as a package manager on the Trisquel 7
> > distribution of GNU/Linux running on a (Minifree) Libreboot X60s. I
> > believe it was successful. Hoping to transition to GuixSD at some
> > point and would be grateful to hear if others have had success with
> > this. Anyway,...
> >
> > I proceeded to install Emacs, Geiser, Magit (subsequently removed),
> > the Source Code Pro (SCP) font, GNU Stow, Git for now and for which I
> > have a number of perhaps trivial queries. A limited search on the
> > list archives turned up nothing so forgive me if these queries have
> > been covered elsewhere.
>
> No problem, this mailing list was created for such questions.
>
> > (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.

> > (2) In terms of Emacs, do fellow Guix users install all packages via
> > Guix instead of the traditional ELPA, MELPA route. I suspect they do
> > as I guess that is the point.
>
> Well, I don't, because currently Guix does not have all the emacs
> packages I use (but it's my fault that I didn't package them :-)), so I
> use some packages from Guix and some from… other places.

This will be true for me too. It's also an area I thought I could help with
in the future.

> > But I ask for advice as my 'pre-guix'
> > emacs config makes heavy use of the use-package macro installing all
> > third party packages to ~/.emacs.d/elpa . I guess I could add the
> > 'guix-emacs' site-lisp directory for each guix installed package to
> > the load-path specifying this in each specific use-package package
> > declaration. Is that what others do?
>
> No, if you use Emacs from Guix ("guix package -i emacs"), you will not
> have to add all those site-lisp directories as Guix's Emacs is patched
> to find and autoload the packages there automatically.

Ok, that should simplify things.

> I think use-package is completely unrelated to this question.  It's not
> "use-package" that installs into "~/.emacs.d/elpa", it's an in-built
> Emacs package system (aka "package.el"), "use-package" does not perform
> any installation by itself.

Yes, you're right and what I wanted to say.

> You can still use Emacs from Guix and use "use-package" from MELPA
> if that's your concern.  You don't need to adjust your emacs config for Guix
> at all.

This is good to hear.

> > (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. 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.

> > (4) I wish to manage my dotfiles with GNU stow. Traditionally, I
> > understand people create a dotfiles directory say under $HOME and
> > create the various subdirectories in this directory from which the
> > symlinks are produced. Is this approach still the same with GNU stow
> > installed via Guix or is the 'stow' directory created elsewhere?
>
> I know nothing about 'stow', but it should behave the same as on any
> other system.
>
> --
> Alex