bug#22695: Binary Installation bugs and suggestions

[Jookia <166291@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> Ninja trick. Did no know. Does it apply in non-bash shells?

Works on zsh here, though presumably that's due to Bash compatibility.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> >> B) What does 'On hosts using the systemd init system, drop
> >>    /root/.guix-profile/lib/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service in
> >>    /etc/systemd/system.' mean.
> >>
> >>    FWIW, I tried ...
> >>
> >> cp /root/.guix-profile/lib/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service \
> >>    /etc/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service
> >>
> >> ... which did not work.
> >
> > How did it “not work”?  Dropping the file there does not start the
> > service automatically.  You’ll need to reload the service definitions
> > and then actually start the service.  But that’s really systemd
> > knowledge, and I don’t think it belongs in the Guix manual unless it’s
> > really short.
> 
> "Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
> [...]
> > What didn't work, exactly?  I've personally done this on systemd
> > setups and it works fine.

> When I reboot my Debian 8 server, guix-daemon is not running.
> 
> IMO, the Guix story is most appealing to a user at this point in time.
> So you want to help a user-level person try out Guix on a machine they
> happen to have root or sudo on. If you force them go off and learn all
> about systemd they may well run out of gas and never insall Guix.
> 
> So I think you should tell them specifically how to make guix-daemon be
> running after a reboot, or they will be reporting that as a bug.

Yeah, it'd probably be good to have some simple instructions 'copy this to there
and run systemctl start guix-daemon' as well as creating the builderaccounts.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> "Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
> [...]
> > This warning is unavoidable when the glibc on the host distro has
> > locales that our incompatible with the glibc that Guix uses.  It's
> > unfortunate, but *much time* was spent dealing with this headache
> > already, including time spent talking to glibc developers.
> 
> The instructions should acknowledge that the warning may occur and can
> safely be ignored.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> [...]
> > The first item in the “Application Setup” section is about locales.  I
> > think it is sufficient the way it is now.  The section in question is
> > about how to install Guix.  Locales and X11 fonts are not required to
> > use Guix.
> 
> OK, but I don't think you want your users seeing recurrent warnings. IMO
> it would be better to advise them to install locales than to let them
> see a warning on every guix operation.

Is there no way we can just ship Guix with a default en_US.UTF-8 locale and have
Guix set GUIX_LOCPATH if it's not done already when running? Though this
wouldn't really help for multilingual support I suppose.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> "Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
> [...]
> >
> > Don't run 'guix package -r guix'.
> 
> Cool, please say that.

Should 'guix package -r guix' be something that require a --force flag or
similiar if it's going to break things beyond belief?

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> But doesn't root want/need to update guix?

Only if it wants to use the updated Guix.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:19:34AM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
> Agreed, when using my home servers. But a sysadmin with only a few hours
> to understand Guix and many users potentially impacted will be much more
> jumpy about the Guix install.

There's always the binary installation method, but I suppose a better questions
would be if it's a good idea to help people who don't understand Guix to install
it. System administrators might for example expect they can limit which software
is installed by their users but Guix doesn't do this.