Re: Eliminate environment variable hints?

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello,

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 10:56:13PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> when installing a package into a profile Guix very helpfully tells you
> that you may need to set certain environment variables.  It doesn’t tell
> you that these environment variables can also be set by source’ing the
> generated etc/profile file.

something I noticed is that I see these recommendations also when the
environment variables are already set, precisely by sourcing the (previous)
$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/profile. Now the profile changed, so they need to
be re-sourced (which I usually do by calling "bash" from bash, since I source
from the .bashrc).

On the other hand, using the recommended environment variables would survive
profile changes, since they look like
   export PATH="/home/andreas/.guix-profile/bin:/home/andreas/.guix-profile/sbin${PATH:+:}$PATH"
instead of pointing to /gnu/store/...-profile/bin with a particular hash.

So the two are clearly not equivalent. Which of them is actually
preferable? I find it a bit confusing that after running
"guix package -i hello" I cannot run "hello" immediately, unlike in
Debian.

I would not be too worried about bash vs. other shells: The current
suggestions already would not work in csh...

Andreas