guix home

guix home

[Andrew Tropin]

Hi guix!

There is an implementation of `guix home` subcommand, which behaves
similar to `guix system`, allowing declaratively manage applications and
their configurations, but for a particular user, not the whole OS:
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/gnu

* Overview
It possible to define the desired environment with home-environment
record, which contains a list of home-services and few other
configuration options and build and install it with `guix home
reconfigure`. The service extension mechanism works the same way as in
operating-system and utilize fold-services from (gnu services).

Current set of implemented essential services:
- home-service :: return the derivation
- home-profile :: manages a separate profile with packages provided by
user or other services
- home-environment-vars :: allows to set env vars for user's shell
- home-shepherd :: manages user's shepherd, can be extended by other services
- home-run-on-first-login :: launches shepherd and some other one-time actions
- home-run-on-reconfigure :: update shepherd configuration and update
symlinks from ~/ and ~/.config to guix-home-environment/files
- home-symlink-manager :: extends on-reconfigure with a update-symlinks script

For now I personally manage just a few applications on my system and it
seems that everything works as expected, but I plan to migrate all the
"dotfiles" to it in nearest future. AFAIK, some people succesfully use
it on other GNU/Linux distributions.

* Alternative solutions
In contrast to guix-home-manager, `guix home` doesn't introduce any too
innovative approaches (those ideas are cool, but in some use cases are
too radical), `guix home` uses the same extension mechanism [fn:1] as
guix system services and doesn't require to make HOME read-only. Thus,
it's possible to start using `guix home` gradually, along with other
tools and workflows (stow, guix package, chezmoi, yadm, etc).

Talking about Nix's home-manager: it's a nice software, but maintained
separately from nix package manager and kinda disconnected from Nix
itself, which introduce a lot of duplications between NixOS modules and
home-manager modules, requires additional installation steps and overall
makes it harder to use for not very experienced nix users. Probably, we
can learn from it and do better here.

* Future steps
`guix home` still under active development, but already complete enough
for exloration and early adoption. There is no any documentation yet,
because things were changing often and probably will change one more
time during comming cleanup, however there were few video streams,
explaining internals of `guix home`:
mpv https://youtu.be/t3zRzQnarUI
mpv https://youtu.be/4lJaVzxO_Bs
mpv https://youtu.be/ZRQtCvo8MoM

In addition to documentation it will be necessary to implement a lot of
home-services for different tools, add rollback, shepherd-graph,
extension-graph and other actions, but before doing it I would like to
spend some time polishing essential services and decide on upstreaming
the tool to guix itself.

The question is: do we want and need at all `guix home` to be a part of
the guix? As for me, the tool seems like a natural addition to guix's
declarative configuration management approach and covers the missing
piece of user space software management and as I mentioned early
upstreaming will allow to make it better integrated with the rest of the
guix and easier to use for newcommers and casual users, but my
perception is obviously biased.

Dear maintainers and users, what do you think about making `guix home` a
part of guix?

* Footnotes

[fn:1] https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel/%3C87sg56g97i.fsf%40trop.in%3E

--
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

Re: guix home

[Joshua Branson]

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> writes:

> Hi guix!
>
> There is an implementation of `guix home` subcommand, which behaves
> similar to `guix system`, allowing declaratively manage applications and
> their configurations, but for a particular user, not the whole OS:
> https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/gnu

Thanks for sharing this!  And it's on sourcehut!  Very rock star of you!

>
> For now I personally manage just a few applications on my system and it
> seems that everything works as expected, but I plan to migrate all the
> "dotfiles" to it in nearest future. AFAIK, some people succesfully use
> it on other GNU/Linux distributions.

That's awesome!

>
> * Alternative solutions
> In contrast to guix-home-manager, `guix home` doesn't introduce any too

For those interested the guix-home-manager is here:
https://framagit.org/tyreunom/guix-home-manager

> innovative approaches (those ideas are cool, but in some use cases are
> too radical), `guix home` uses the same extension mechanism [fn:1] as
> guix system services and doesn't require to make HOME read-only. Thus,
> it's possible to start using `guix home` gradually, along with other
> tools and workflows (stow, guix package, chezmoi, yadm, etc).

Honestly, this is why I haven't tried the guix-home-manager.  I didn't
want to make /home read only.  That sounded hard to switch to.  I'll
have to give your guix home command a try!  It sounds easy!

> * Future steps
> `guix home` still under active development, but already complete enough
> for exloration and early adoption. There is no any documentation yet,
> because things were changing often and probably will change one more
> time during comming cleanup, however there were few video streams,
> explaining internals of `guix home`:
> mpv https://youtu.be/t3zRzQnarUI
> mpv https://youtu.be/4lJaVzxO_Bs
> mpv https://youtu.be/ZRQtCvo8MoM
>
> The question is: do we want and need at all `guix home` to be a part of
> the guix? As for me, the tool seems like a natural addition to guix's
> declarative configuration management approach and covers the missing
> piece of user space software management and as I mentioned early
> upstreaming will allow to make it better integrated with the rest of the
> guix and easier to use for newcommers and casual users, but my
> perception is obviously biased.

I believe the goal is to eventually merge guix-home-manager (or
something like it) into guix.  (I'm more of a guix documentation guy, so
perhaps a guix developer can better answer this).

> --
> Best regards,
> Andrew Tropin

I'm going to remember that name.  Andrew's going places!

--
Joshua Branson (joshuaBPMan in #guix)
Sent from Emacs and Gnus
  https://gnucode.me
  https://video.hardlimit.com/accounts/joshua_branson/video-channels
  https://propernaming.org
  "You can have whatever you want, as long as you help
enough other people get what they want." - Zig Ziglar

Re: guix home

[Ryan Prior]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 899 bytes --]

On March 14, 2021, Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de> wrote:
> Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> writes:
>
> > There is an implementation of `guix home` subcommand, which behaves
> > similar to `guix system`

Thanks for sharing this Andrew, it looks awesome & I'm going to give it
a try!

What do you think about changing the command? It manages user files,
user services, user environment variables, the lifecycle of user
sessions. So we could have "guix system" for system-level things, and
"guix user" for user-level things. Similarly, many of the services you
describe sound to me like they would be easier to understand what they
do with names like "user-service," "user-environment-vars," etc.

I feel Guix needs something like this upstream. Whether this is the
right implementation or not I'm not qualified to judge, but I'll read
the source code and see what I can learn or contribute!

Ryan

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3416 bytes --]

Re: guix home

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:

> There is an implementation of `guix home` subcommand, which behaves
> similar to `guix system`, allowing declaratively manage applications and
> their configurations, but for a particular user, not the whole OS:
> https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/gnu
>
> * Overview
> It possible to define the desired environment with home-environment
> record, which contains a list of home-services and few other
> configuration options and build and install it with `guix home
> reconfigure`. The service extension mechanism works the same way as in
> operating-system and utilize fold-services from (gnu services).
>
> Current set of implemented essential services:
> - home-service :: return the derivation
> - home-profile :: manages a separate profile with packages provided by
> user or other services
> - home-environment-vars :: allows to set env vars for user's shell
> - home-shepherd :: manages user's shepherd, can be extended by other services
> - home-run-on-first-login :: launches shepherd and some other one-time actions
> - home-run-on-reconfigure :: update shepherd configuration and update
> symlinks from ~/ and ~/.config to guix-home-environment/files
> - home-symlink-manager :: extends on-reconfigure with a update-symlinks script

Nice!

When I stumbled upon your message, I thought it was about Julien’s
guix-home-manager, but now I gather you’re actually announcing another
project.  There’s no name like “home”.  :-)

> * Alternative solutions
> In contrast to guix-home-manager, `guix home` doesn't introduce any too
> innovative approaches (those ideas are cool, but in some use cases are
> too radical), `guix home` uses the same extension mechanism [fn:1] as
> guix system services and doesn't require to make HOME read-only. Thus,
> it's possible to start using `guix home` gradually, along with other
> tools and workflows (stow, guix package, chezmoi, yadm, etc).

I see.  So do I get it right that ‘guix home’ focuses primarily on
profile and user service management?  Could you give examples of a
minimal config and command invocations?

> Talking about Nix's home-manager: it's a nice software, but maintained
> separately from nix package manager and kinda disconnected from Nix
> itself, which introduce a lot of duplications between NixOS modules and
> home-manager modules, requires additional installation steps and overall
> makes it harder to use for not very experienced nix users. Probably, we
> can learn from it and do better here.

Agreed.

> * Future steps
> `guix home` still under active development, but already complete enough
> for exloration and early adoption. There is no any documentation yet,
> because things were changing often and probably will change one more
> time during comming cleanup, however there were few video streams,
> explaining internals of `guix home`:
> mpv https://youtu.be/t3zRzQnarUI
> mpv https://youtu.be/4lJaVzxO_Bs
> mpv https://youtu.be/ZRQtCvo8MoM

Oh nice, now I have to watch those!

> In addition to documentation it will be necessary to implement a lot of
> home-services for different tools, add rollback, shepherd-graph,
> extension-graph and other actions, but before doing it I would like to
> spend some time polishing essential services and decide on upstreaming
> the tool to guix itself.
>
> The question is: do we want and need at all `guix home` to be a part of
> the guix? As for me, the tool seems like a natural addition to guix's
> declarative configuration management approach and covers the missing
> piece of user space software management and as I mentioned early
> upstreaming will allow to make it better integrated with the rest of the
> guix and easier to use for newcommers and casual users, but my
> perception is obviously biased.
>
> Dear maintainers and users, what do you think about making `guix home` a
> part of guix?

I have yet to familiarize myself with ‘guix home’, but overall, I think
a solution à la ‘guix home’ or guix-home-manager would be a welcome
addition to Guix.

I agree that these tools are a natural extension of Guix and that it
makes sense to settle on one approach and make it part of Guix proper.

Thanks!

Ludo’.

Re: guix home

[Julien Lepiller]

Le 15 mars 2021 12:51:16 GMT-04:00, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org> a écrit :
>Hi Andrew,
>
>Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:
>>
>> The question is: do we want and need at all `guix home` to be a part
>of
>> the guix? As for me, the tool seems like a natural addition to guix's
>> declarative configuration management approach and covers the missing
>> piece of user space software management and as I mentioned early
>> upstreaming will allow to make it better integrated with the rest of
>the
>> guix and easier to use for newcommers and casual users, but my
>> perception is obviously biased.
>>
>> Dear maintainers and users, what do you think about making `guix
>home` a
>> part of guix?
>
>I have yet to familiarize myself with ‘guix home’, but overall, I think
>a solution à la ‘guix home’ or guix-home-manager would be a welcome
>addition to Guix.
>
>I agree that these tools are a natural extension of Guix and that it
>makes sense to settle on one approach and make it part of Guix proper.

Obviously I'm not a big fan of having configuration that can be modified after I ran guix home, but I understand this approach sounds less crazy :). I think both approaches have a lot more in common than they diverge, so merging one in guix is just one step away of merging the other :)

Having a read-only home is a fun experiment (that have been going since I started guix-home-manager, so it's definitely possible), but a bit broken, and I keep poking holes for software I can't manage properly.

Also, I had this grand vision of using "extension points" in services, which might be useful to have in Guix. Though I never ended up using them in any meaningful way ^^'.

Merging either of our work will make it more visible and attract more users/contributors, that would be great! If we settle with Andrew's approach, I'd be glad to provide my own services, but I will also probably add something to get back my dear read-only home, because that's the intellectually superior approach, albeit broken ;)

>
>Thanks!
>
>Ludo’.

Re: guix home

[Andrew Tropin]

Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de> writes:

> I'll have to give your guix home command a try!  It sounds easy!

One of the goals is to make it effortless to use) For now we still
implement services for basic software and some fundamental features, but
in a couple of weeks plan to invite few more people to actively use
`guix home`. Follow the news on rde-announces mailing list [fn:1].

Thank you for kind supportive words!

Ryan Prior <ryanprior@hey.com> writes:

> Thanks for sharing this Andrew, it looks awesome & I'm going to give it
> a try!

You are very welcome!)

> What do you think about changing the command? It manages user files,
> user services, user environment variables, the lifecycle of user
> sessions. So we could have "guix system" for system-level things, and
> "guix user" for user-level things.

I don't have very strong preference here and open for discussion, but
will provide my rationale for original naming:

- `guix system` manages operating systems and its generations and stuff.
- `guix package` installs, removes, upgrades packages.

Following this convention `guix user` would have to manage users, while
`guix home` manages user's home folders and related stuff. I find home
subcommand more suitable here, however other internal naming may be
temporary and is a subject to change if better options are found.

> Similarly, many of the services you describe sound to me like they
> would be easier to understand what they do with names like
> "user-service," "user-environment-vars," etc.

It's maybe true, however, the other benefit of home- naming is it makes
all the related concepts distinct. It will be harder to confuse
home-services with systemd user service for example. Still have to work
on a better naming in some places.

> I feel Guix needs something like this upstream. Whether this is the
> right implementation or not I'm not qualified to judge, but I'll read
> the source code and see what I can learn or contribute!

All the contributions from discussions to patches are welcome!)

* Footnotes

[fn:1] https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-announce

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

Re: guix home

[Andrew Tropin]

> I see.  So do I get it right that `guix home` focuses primarily on
> profile and user service management?  Could you give examples of a
> minimal config and command invocations?

It optionally invades in different parts of the user environment:

- Manages configurations for user programs via home-services.
- Manages a separate profile with packages declared by user or service.
- Manages shell and its environment.
- Starts a shepherd on first login and other long-living processes from
  that.
- (Not yet in master) Manages state (like cloning git repos, bringing
  folder with wallpapers from backup server on new installation),
  potentially it can not only init state, but also sync/backup/archive
  it in the future.

https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/examples/home-environment.scm.tmpl
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/gnu/README

> Oh nice, now I have to watch those!

Let me know what you think. Will be glad to hear all the comments and
suggestions on both content and delivery.

> I have yet to familiarize myself with ‘guix home’, but overall, I think
> a solution à la ‘guix home’ or guix-home-manager would be a welcome
> addition to Guix.

I would be glad to upstream it. We still completing some must have
features, home-services for important software and generic helpers for
declaring new ones. If you have any tips for simplification upstreaming
of such relatively beefy tool to keep in mind, please share them and I
hope, when `guix home` will be complete enough, the review and merge
process will be less painful.

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

Re: guix home

[Andrew Tropin]

Hi Julien, very glad to see you here!)

> Obviously I'm not a big fan of having configuration that can be modified
> after I ran guix home, but I understand this approach sounds less crazy
> :). I think both approaches have a lot more in common than they diverge,
> so merging one in guix is just one step away of merging the other :)
>
> Having a read-only home is a fun experiment (that have been going since
> I started guix-home-manager, so it's definitely possible), but a bit
> broken, and I keep poking holes for software I can't manage properly.

I really like the idea of strict separation of configuration and state,
and read-only home sounds like a rational solution to me, however it's
not a step in the right direction, but a leap, which not possible for
many even advanced users right now.

I considered many options like read-only home, read-only ~/.config and
few others, but decided that the transition to a new tool for most people
should be iterative and as smooth as possible. It will help to grow and
educate the community before exposing them to smart and great, but very
unusual approaches.

Thus, targeted symlinking is more a social decision rather than
technical. Configs itself remain immutable, but can be mixed with files
managed by user or other software.

> Also, I had this grand vision of using "extension points" in services,
> which might be useful to have in Guix. Though I never ended up using
> them in any meaningful way ^^'.

I have a small write-up on the topic [fn:1]. From time to time I feel
restricted by service extension mechanism, I know use cases where some
improvements to the mechanism will be beneficial, but for now I would
say they are statistically insignificant and can be workarounded with
other tools.

`guix home` propose the evolutionary approach here too, we stick with
what we have in guix system service extension mechanism, make a tool to
be a part of the guix, grow user base, collect use cases hard to solve
with current capabilities, make a decision based on collected data to
improve/modify extension mechanism, which affects both `guix system` and
`guix home`.

Otherwise, we can face a problem of integration gap, which won't be
solved in years.

> Merging either of our work will make it more visible and attract more
> users/contributors, that would be great! If we settle with Andrew's
> approach, I'd be glad to provide my own services, but I will also
> probably add something to get back my dear read-only home, because
> that's the intellectually superior approach, albeit broken ;)

As I said earlier I endorse and support all the good ideas and would like
to see them in `guix home`, keeping a space for users to allow them
making one small step at a time towards wonderful world of declarative
configurations, not giant leap)

Appreciate all your ideas and the work you did on the project, I learned
quite a lot from it!

* Footnotes

[fn:1] https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde-devel/%3C87sg56g97i.fsf%40trop.in%3E

guix home

[Gottfried]

[-- Attachment #1.1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 274 bytes --]

Hi,

has everybody of you installed his personal environment "guix home"

or is there somebody who hasn’t?
If so, why?

I am going to shape my configuration
and checking out what others do
to find the best solution for my case.
-- 
Kind regards

Gottfried


[-- Attachment #1.1.2: OpenPGP public key --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-keys, Size: 3191 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 840 bytes --]

Re: guix home

[hub.lombard]

Hi Gotfried,

I have installed my personal 'guix home' environment. There must be some users who haven't installed it.

Guix Home provides the fully declarative configuration of the Guix System to home directories.
Not an expert at all :) Please, read the following link for infos:

https://guix.gnu.org/fr/blog/2022/keeping-ones-home-tidy/


Happy hacking with guix home!


Hubert

----- Mail original -----
De: "Gottfried" <gottfried@posteo.de>
À: help-guix@gnu.org
Envoyé: Dimanche 26 Mars 2023 18:43:07
Objet: guix home

Hi,

has everybody of you installed his personal environment "guix home"

or is there somebody who hasn’t?
If so, why?

I am going to shape my configuration
and checking out what others do
to find the best solution for my case.
-- 
Kind regards

Gottfried

Re: guix home

[hub.lombard]

Hi again Gottfried!

I forgot to tell you my guix home... It is still quite minimal. Here it is:

.guix-home/configuration.scm

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(use-modules
  (gnu home)
  (gnu home services desktop)
  (gnu services mcron)
  (gnu packages)
  (gnu services)
  (guix gexp)
  (gnu home services shells))

(home-environment
  (packages
    (map (compose list specification->package+output)
         (list "polkit"
               "bitmask"
               "youtube-dl"
               "jami"
               "zynaddsubfx"
               "inkscape"
               "gimp"
               "obs"
               "nextcloud-client"
               "transmission"
               "handbrake"
               "mpv"
               "quassel"
               "claws-mail"
               "ublock-origin-chromium"
               "ungoogled-chromium"
               "wireguard-tools"
               "vim"
               "dosfstools")))
               
;;  (simple-service 'idutils home-mcron-service-type
;;                ;; Every day at 12:15 and 19:15.
;;                (list #~(job '(next-minute-from (next-hour '(12 19)) '(15))
;;                             (string-append #$idutils "/bin/mkid \
;;-o $HOME/.idutils/src.db $HOME/src")))) 
;;"/bin/mkid -o $HOME/.idutils/src.db $HOME/src"))))) : invalid field specifier            
               
  (services
        (list
        (simple-service 'idutils home-mcron-service-type
                ;; Every day at 12:15 and 19:15.
                (list #~(job '(next-minute-from (next-hour '(12 19)) '(15))
                             (string-append #$idutils "/bin/mkid \
-o $HOME/.idutils/src.db $HOME/src"))))   
       (service
          home-redshift-service-type
          (home-redshift-configuration
             (location-provider 'manual)
             (latitude 35.81)    ;northern hemisphere
             (longitude -0.80))) ;west of Greenwich
          (service
            home-bash-service-type
            (home-bash-configuration
              (aliases
                '(("grep='grep --color" . "auto")
                  ("ll" . "ls -l")
                  ("ls='ls -p --color" . "auto")))
              (bashrc
                (list (local-file
                        "/home/hubert/src/guix-config/.bashrc"
                        "bashrc")))
              (bash-profile
                (list (local-file
                        "/home/hubert/src/guix-config/.bash_profile"
                        "bash_profile"))))))))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------


----- Mail original -----
De: "hub lombard" <hub.lombard@free.fr>
À: "Gottfried" <gottfried@posteo.de>
Cc: help-guix@gnu.org
Envoyé: Dimanche 26 Mars 2023 19:09:26
Objet: Re: guix home

Hi Gotfried,

I have installed my personal 'guix home' environment. There must be some users who haven't installed it.

Guix Home provides the fully declarative configuration of the Guix System to home directories.
Not an expert at all :) Please, read the following link for infos:

https://guix.gnu.org/fr/blog/2022/keeping-ones-home-tidy/


Happy hacking with guix home!


Hubert

----- Mail original -----
De: "Gottfried" <gottfried@posteo.de>
À: help-guix@gnu.org
Envoyé: Dimanche 26 Mars 2023 18:43:07
Objet: guix home

Hi,

has everybody of you installed his personal environment "guix home"

or is there somebody who hasn’t?
If so, why?

I am going to shape my configuration
and checking out what others do
to find the best solution for my case.
-- 
Kind regards

Gottfried

Re: guix home

[Csepp]

Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Hi,
>
> has everybody of you installed his personal environment "guix home"
>
> or is there somebody who hasn’t?
> If so, why?
>
> I am going to shape my configuration
> and checking out what others do
> to find the best solution for my case.

I'm using it on my netbook, but not on my other two main machines.
Honestly, I would suggest not using it, it's pretty rough around the
edges currently.  It is also not documented how to uninstall it.

Re: guix home

[Gottfried]

[-- Attachment #1.1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 738 bytes --]

Hi,

  thanks a lot for this very important message.

Then I won't install guix home now.

Kind regards

Gottfried


Am 28.03.23 um 01:28 schrieb Csepp:
> 
> Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> writes:
> 
>> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
>> Hi,
>>
>> has everybody of you installed his personal environment "guix home"
>>
>> or is there somebody who hasn’t?
>> If so, why?
>>
>> I am going to shape my configuration
>> and checking out what others do
>> to find the best solution for my case.
> 
> I'm using it on my netbook, but not on my other two main machines.
> Honestly, I would suggest not using it, it's pretty rough around the
> edges currently.  It is also not documented how to uninstall it.

-- 

[-- Attachment #1.1.2: OpenPGP public key --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-keys, Size: 3191 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 840 bytes --]