Re: to enable all profiles at login time

[Wojtek Kosior via <help-guix@gnu.org>]

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> Hi,
> thanks for helping me.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> 1.
> I added:
> "GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES=/home/gfp/Projekte"
> to my /.bash_profile
> 
> 2.
> I changed the sentence
> "profile=$i/$(basename "$i")"
>   to:
>   "profile=$i"
> 
> 3.
> my /.bash_profile looks now, after changing like this:
> 
> [...]

Looks good :)

> Where do I have to add "-l" in /.bashrc?

You don't add it to `.bashrc`. Instead, you need to configure your
*terminal emulator*. It is the graphical application that you use to
access the command line. Since you mentioned you're using Mate desktop,
I suspect the terminal emulator you are using is "mate-terminal" and
I'll give you instructions for that. If you happen to be using
a different one (like xfce4-terminal, konsole, sakura, xterm, etc.),
the steps are going to be slightly different.

So, right-click somewhene in your mate-terminal window and choose
"Profiles->Profile Preferences" as in the attached screenshot. Then, in
the "Editing Profile" windows that shows, switch to the "Title and
Command" tab and tick the "Run command as a login shell" option (as
shown in the second attached screenshot). Finally, close the "Editing
Profile" window.

Once you restart mate-terminal, it should run bash as a login shell.
You can verify this by running the following command (well, 2 commands)

    shopt -q login_shell; echo $?

If the bash instance you're interacting with is a login shell, it shall
print "0". Otherwise, it'll print "1".


Now, it might be good to clarify some things. What we're doing here
does *not* enable your profiles when you start the Mate desktop. It
instead enables them when you start mate-terminal with bash in it. In
other words, your profiles get enabled when you "log in" in a terminal.
And here we're just causing the execution of mate-terminal application
to be treated as such login.

But don't worry about these details — this is what you want. The lines
you now have in your `.bash_profile` will also enable your Guix
profiles when you log in through a TTY or through SSH. This is the
correct behavior :)


Best luck ;)

Wojtek


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On Mon, 17 Apr 2023 07:37:40 +0000
Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> thanks for helping me.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> 1.
> I added:
> "GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES=/home/gfp/Projekte"
> to my /.bash_profile
> 
> 2.
> I changed the sentence
> "profile=$i/$(basename "$i")"
>   to:
>   "profile=$i"
> 
> 3.
> my /.bash_profile looks now, after changing like this:
> 
> # Honor per-interactive-shell startup file
> if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi
> 
> GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES=/home/gfp/Projekte
> for i in $GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES/*; do
>    profile=$i
>    if [ -f "$profile"/etc/profile ]; then
>      GUIX_PROFILE="$profile"
>      . "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile
>    fi
>    unset profile
> done
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 4.
> my /.bashrc looks like this
> 
> # Bash initialization for interactive non-login shells and
> # for remote shells (info "(bash) Bash Startup Files").
> 
> # Export 'SHELL' to child processes.  Programs such as 'screen'
> # honor it and otherwise use /bin/sh.
> export SHELL
> 
> if [[ $- != *i* ]]
> then
>      # We are being invoked from a non-interactive shell.  If this
>      # is an SSH session (as in "ssh host command"), source
>      # /etc/profile so we get PATH and other essential variables.
>      [[ -n "$SSH_CLIENT" ]] && source /etc/profile
> 
>      # Don't do anything else.
>      return
> fi
> 
> # Source the system-wide file.
> source /etc/bashrc
> 
> # Adjust the prompt depending on whether we're in 'guix environment'.
> if [ -n "$GUIX_ENVIRONMENT" ]
> then
>      PS1='\u@\h \w [env]\$ '
> else
>      PS1='\u@\h \w\$ '
> fi
> alias ls='ls -p --color=auto'
> alias ll='ls -l'
> alias grep='grep --color=auto'
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> > change the configuration of one's terminal emulator to start bash  
> >>    with `-l`  
> 
> 5.
> Where do I have to add "-l" in /.bashrc?
> 
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> Gottfried
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 16.04.23 um 22:18 schrieb Wojtek Kosior:
> > Hi Gottfried,
> > 
> > I see 3 potential problems.
> > 
> > 1.
> > The snippet you addet to .bashrc refers to a variable named
> > "GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES". Is this variable defined somewhere? Is seems it
> > isn't. It should be assigned the path to the directory holding your
> > profiles so you could for example add a
> > 
> >      GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES=/path/to/directory/with/my/guix/profiles
> > 
> > line before the `for` loop. Of course, replacing the
> > "/path/to/directory/with/my/guix/profiles" with the appropriate path
> > for your system.
> > 
> > 2.
> > Why is `basename` being used here? Consider the following example:
> > 
> > - "GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES" is set to /home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff
> > - you have 1 extra Guix profile under
> >    "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music"
> > - the profile mentioned above has its `profile` script under
> >    "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music/etc/profile"
> > 
> > Now, let's look at what the
> > 
> >      profile=$i/$(basename "$i")
> > 
> > line does. This line is inside a `for` loop, in each iteration the
> > variable "i" holds the path to one of the profiles under
> > "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff". In one iteration "i" is going to hold
> > the string "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music". The `basename "$i"`
> > command therefore outputs just "music". So the line we're analyzing
> > assigns the string "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music/music" to
> > variable called "profile". Is this what we wanted? The next line is
> > going to check for the existence of file
> > "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music/music/etc/profile" but it should
> > instead check for the existence of
> > "/home/user/my-extra-guix-stuff/music/etc/profile". So you might want
> > to e.g. replace the line
> > 
> >      profile=$i/$(basename "$i")
> > 
> > with just
> > 
> >      profile=$i
> > 
> > 3.
> > You edited "~/.bash_profile" which is indeed known to be read by bash.
> > 
> > However, this is not that simple. Bash has 3 possible modes of running:
> > non-interactive shell, interactive shell and (interactive) login shell.
> > The "login shell" mode is meant to be used when, well, bash is spawned
> > in a terminal upon user login. "~/.bash_profile" is *only* read by bash
> > in this mode and not in the other 2. In interactive shell mode, bash
> > reads "~/.bashrc" *instead*.
> > 
> > When you, for example, execute a `bash` command inside an
> > already-running shell, the child bash shell that spawns is not going to
> > consider itself a login shell but rather a mere interactive shell. To
> > make bash think is is a login shell, you can e.g. start it with a `-l`
> > flag, like `bash -l`.
> > 
> > The problem is, most terminal emulators by default don't start bash
> > this way. The 2 solutions I've been using are to either
> > - change the configuration of one's terminal emulator to start bash
> >    with `-l`
> > - or make the ".bashrc" script check if current interactive shell was
> >    spawned by a teminal emulator process and if yes, have it activate the
> >    Guix profiles.
> > 
> > The 1st solution is the proper one, the 2nd one is just a workaround
> > for terminal emulators that are not configurable enough :)
> > 
> > 
> > Wojtek
> > 
> > 
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> > 
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> > 
> > 
> > On Sun, 16 Apr 2023 13:09:00 +0000
> > Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> according to the cookbook
> >> I added
> >> --------------------------------------------
> >> for i in $GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES/*; do
> >>     profile=$i/$(basename "$i")
> >>     if [ -f "$profile"/etc/profile ]; then
> >>       GUIX_PROFILE="$profile"
> >>       . "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile
> >>     fi
> >>     unset profile
> >> done
> >> -----------------------------------------------
> >> into my .bash_profile file
> >> in order to enable all profiles at login time:
> >> ------------------------------------------------
> >> My .bash_profile file looks now like that:
> >>
> >> # Honor per-interactive-shell startup file
> >> if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi
> >>
> >> for i in $GUIX_EXTRA_PROFILES/*; do
> >>     profile=$i/$(basename "$i")
> >>     if [ -f "$profile"/etc/profile ]; then
> >>       GUIX_PROFILE="$profile"
> >>       . "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile
> >>     fi
> >>     unset profile
> >> done
> >> -----------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> but when starting MATE Desktop all my profiles are not enabled.
> >>
> >> Could somebody help because probably the two entries in my .bash_profile
> >> got a mistake.
> >>  
> > 
> >   
> 



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