GUIX_LOCPATH in empty environments vs profiles

[Phil Beadling <phil@beadling.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I've noticed what looks like me to be a discrepancy between environments
and profile.

I'm running Guix as a package manager over Ubuntu in this instance.

If I create even an empty environment in Guix, GUIX_LOCPATH is set, but in
order to achieve the same ends in a profile I need to explicitly include
glibc-utf8-locales as either a propagated input or in a manifest (assuming
my default profile is empty).

This tripped me up the last 24 hours - I had a manifest which would install
and run just fine as an environment but which was producing mysterious
runtime errors after installing without error into a profile (due to one of
the libraries requiring locale files I eventually worked out).

I've always expected enironments and profiles to behave the same as a
runtime environment, when provided with the same inputs to create them - is
there a reason for this discrepancy that I'm missing?

Should I always install locales into my default profile, rather than keep
them empty (they are not needed for many of my profile use-cases so it
seems a waste to install them by default)?


Cheers,
Phil.


$ guix environment

The following derivation will be built:

   /gnu/store/ga3dgkjwjz9s73khf5vbwx53i8n0ax8w-profile.drv



*building profile with 0 packages...*





$ echo $GUIX_LOCPATH

/gnu/store/rgydar9dfvflqqz2irgh7njj34amaxc6-glibc-utf8-locales-2.31/lib/locale

$