Managing user environments

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Hi Guix!

A few months ago, I created a new channel called the guix home manager whose purpose is to allow to manage user environments in a similar way to services.

The channel is about managing dotfiles. I think configuration should be managed in a stateless fashion, and that's what guix is good at. Ricardo encouraged me today to thare it and maybe work on integrating it in Guix proper. What do you think?

You can find the current code here: https://framagit.org/tyreunom/guix-home-manager

This channel currently works by building a guix profile, so it provides roll-back and atomicity in general. The profile corresponds to the whole home directory, which makes it read-only. There are ways to "punch holes", especially for the XDG cache and data directories, but also for any unsupported application. Supported applications are configured with a record-type, like system services.

I still have some doubts about it, whether it's in the scope for guix or not, whether it actually scales, and such. Any opinion is welcome. Again, would you like to see it, or a modified version of it,in guix itself or should it be kept in a separate channel?

Thanks!