bug#37387: reconfigure does not recreate ~/.guix-profile

bug#37387: reconfigure does not recreate ~/.guix-profile

[Joshua Branson via Bug reports for GNU Guix]

Hey guix,

;tldr guix system reconfigure does not create a ~/.guix-profile, if
 the file was deleted, nor does it change the symlink if the username
 changed.

This seems like 2 tiny bugs.  I recently installed guix on my Thinkpad
T400.  (Thanks by the way!  Sway works wonderfully!)  When I first
created my user my user line looked like

#+BEGIN_SRC scheme
         (user-account
          (name "Joshua Branson")
          (comment "Joshua Branson")
          (group "users")
          (home-directory "/home/joshua")
          (supplementary-groups
           '("wheel" "netdev" "audio" "video")))
#+END_SRC scheme

Later I changed the user name to '(name "joshua")' and reconfigured.
Guix was smart enough to create a new profile for me, but
.guix-profile still pointed to user account "Joshua Branson" not
"joshua".


$ cd ~/; ls -lha .guix-profile
.guix-profile -> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/Joshua Branson/guix-profile

So I removed .guix-profile and reconfigured.

$ rm ~/.guix-profile

# sudo guix system reconfigure sway.scm

I thought that guix is declarative, so it will recreate .guix-profile,
but it did not.

Thanks,

Joshua

bug#37387: reconfigure does not recreate ~/.guix-profile

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Joshua,

> ;tldr guix system reconfigure does not create a ~/.guix-profile

This is not a bug.

“guix system reconfigure” will never create .guix-profile.  That’s not
what it’s supposed to do.

~/.guix-profile is created when a profile is generated and installed,
i.e. when a user installs their first package.

-- 
Ricardo