glibc-locales and other Application Setup on foreign distros

glibc-locales and other Application Setup on foreign distros

[Quiliro Ordonez]

I have found some problems with Guix foreign distro:

** Locales.-
The manual advises (on section 2.6 Application Setup) to add
glibc-locales on foreign distros. But it does not advise to include the
following necessary statements on each user's .bashrc:
export GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.guix-profile"
export GUIX_LOCPATH="$GUIX_PROFILE/lib/locale"
export PATH="$HOME/.config/guix/current/bin${PATH:+:}$PATH"
I have tested several inclusions and exclusions and the above is what
has worked for me in Debian 8. Maybe it would be better that guix
installation itself did this.

** NSS and X.509 Certificates.-
The manual advises to add this service. But it will not specify how to
add it as it does with locales. Is it supposed to be added by way of the
foreign distro installer or via 'guix package -i' on the root user? It
appears to be on the foreign distro because it specifies the 'system'
should run it. But this is not a categorical affirmation. The name of
the possible package and the command for some example distro would be
good to specify too. The same goes for X.509 Certificates.

** X11 Fonts.-
The manual specifies to install some fonts. I ran this command as user:
guix package -i gs-fonts font-dejavu font-gnu-freefont-ttfgs-fonts
font-dejavu font-gnu-freefont-ttf
and I get this error:
guix package: error: font-gnu-freefont-ttfgs-fonts: unknown package

Re: glibc-locales and other Application Setup on foreign distros

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Wed, 6 Feb 2019 at 21:22, Quiliro Ordonez <quiliro@riseup.net> wrote:

> ** Locales.-
> The manual advises (on section 2.6 Application Setup) to add
> glibc-locales on foreign distros. But it does not advise to include the
> following necessary statements on each user's .bashrc:
> export GUIX_PROFILE="$HOME/.guix-profile"

This is not related to the locales.
Otherwise, this advice is given in the "Invoking guix package" section
of the manual.

> export GUIX_LOCPATH="$GUIX_PROFILE/lib/locale"

When you `guix package -i glibc-locales' then it advices you about that.

> export PATH="$HOME/.config/guix/current/bin${PATH:+:}$PATH"

This is not related to the locales.
But basically this is related to which version of Guix you will use.
Roughly speaking, when you `guix pull' then you update the Guix living
here "$HOME/.config/guix/current/bin".

> I have tested several inclusions and exclusions and the above is what
> has worked for me in Debian 8. Maybe it would be better that guix
> installation itself did this.

If only one user has an account, it is difficult to guess which shell
needs to be configured; .bashrc ou .zshrc etc.
And it becomes more difficult when more users have an account.


> ** NSS and X.509 Certificates.-
> The manual advises to add this service. But it will not specify how to
> add it as it does with locales. Is it supposed to be added by way of the
> foreign distro installer or via 'guix package -i' on the root user? It

It depends on.

Basically, once you have installed Guix on the foreign distro, then
the root user does not have any special power and all the operations
are done as a regular user.

So, with your regular account,  `guix package -i nss-certs' and add
the environment variables it advices.


> appears to be on the foreign distro because it specifies the 'system'
> should run it. But this is not a categorical affirmation. The name of
> the possible package and the command for some example distro would be
> good to specify too. The same goes for X.509 Certificates.

Note that the nss-certs installation should not be automatic because
it is the responsability of the user to trust these certificates.
Maybe a question should be added to the binary installer but I think
it is not the priority. :-)


> ** X11 Fonts.-
> The manual specifies to install some fonts. I ran this command as user:
> guix package -i gs-fonts font-dejavu font-gnu-freefont-ttfgs-fonts
> font-dejavu font-gnu-freefont-ttf
> and I get this error:
> guix package: error: font-gnu-freefont-ttfgs-fonts: unknown package

Euh?
font-gnu-freefont-ttfgs-fonts does not make sense.
Do you mean font-gnu-freefont-ttf and gs-fonts?
Maybe you did a mistake when copy/pasting. :-)


Hope that helps,
simon