Re: Is it possible add 'Guix package manager without "make install"' to guix doc?

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès writes:
>
> [...]
>
>>> What I would like is to have a “Guix Development” section in the manual,
>>> along the lines of “Running Guix before it is installed” in ‘HACKING’,
>>> but marked as a developer’s trick.
>>
>> That sounds like a good idea.
>
> Done in c71979f.  Comments & patches welcome!  :-)

Hey nice!

>>> I do not feel like explicitly inviting users to do “alias
>>> guix=~/guix/pre-inst-env guix”, though, because that seems a bit hacky.
>>> ;-)
>>>
>>> WDYT?
>>
>> Do you have an alternative suggestion so that running guix easily in
>> bash is possible?  Per my current blogpost, this alias is only set up
>> after running guix-enable.  I agree it's not ideal, and am open to alternatives.
>
> I think if we document ./pre-inst-env, then it’ll be clear that people
> can do this sort of thing.  All I’m saying is that I’d rather not
> document the technique from your post in extenso because that’s not very
> nice.

Makes sense.

Btw a bit of a tangent but ./pre-inst-env is an interesting technique
that I learned for my own Guile hacking stuff because Dave Thompson
pointed it out to me in Sly (which in turn borrowed from Guix), and
learning that I could hack on things by running "./pre-inst-env guile
--listen" then using connect-to-guile in geiser... that's another one of
those techniques which seems known in the community but I only found out
because I know someone who knows. :) But it's a good pattern!  I wonder
if we should have recommendations on how to hack on and package guile
stuff somewhere.  But I guess that's a guile-dev or guile-user
conversation...

> I confess that, being biased as I am ;-), I don’t fully understand the
> rationale: after all, you’re already installing /gnu and
> /usr/local/var/guix, so why is it so important to not install two more
> files in /usr/local/bin?
>
> But really, it’s just me being ignorant about the use case, so I’m happy
> to read what people think/want.

Well, for me it's two reasons:
 - I've had pain with things being dumped to /usr/local/ and then
   trouble removing the whole thing before, not to mention forgetting
   that they're there.  I try to avoid installing to my system unless
   using a package manager (and now, guix counts as one of those ;))
 - I also wanted to hack on guix and guix packages... I guess, maybe
   it's possible to do with a make install?  But given that I'm
   interactively hacking on the project, wouldn't I want to not have to
   do a "make install" every time and instead use whatever's in git?

   Similarly, I've wondered, how do GuixSD users hack on Guix, if Guix
   is already installed system-wide?  Genuine question!

>>> For the Emacs part, I think setting ‘load-path’,
>>> ‘geiser-guile-load-path’, and ‘guix-load-path’ would be enough.  Maybe
>>> that part of the doc needs to be adjusted?
>>
>> Does that work?
>
> I have ~/src/guix/emacs in ‘load-path’ and ~/src/guix in
> ‘geiser-guile-load-path’, and that’s all it takes, AFAICS.  Alex?

Aha, ok!

> Thanks for your feedback!
>
> Ludo’.

Thanks for integrating!