Re: [Blog/Cookbook?] On multiple Guix profiles and manifests

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Pierre,

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> skribis:

> So what about writing a blog article / cookbook chapter to explain why
> profiles and manifests are truly awesome indeed?  (Unless this has
> already been done and I missed it?)

Go for it!  :-)

Seriously, I’ve discussed profiles and all with several newcomers, who
hadn’t really discovered that facility initially, and the discussion
obviously talks about how to use them, when to use them, and so on.

So I think a section in the Cookbook would be very welcome!

> We can create a manifest per profile and install them this way:
>
>   guix package --manifest=/path/to/guix-dev-manifest.scm  --profile=$HOME/.guix-extra-profiles/dev/dev
>   
> Placing all your profiles in a single folder, with each profile getting its own
> subfolder is somewhat cleaner, plus it's obvious to "loop over profiles" from
> any programming language (e.g. a shell script) by
> simply looping over the sub-directories of .guix-extra-profiles.
>
> Note that it's also possible to loop over the output of `guix package
> --list-profiles` although you'll probably have to filter out
> `~/.config/guix/current`.

Yes, I was going to suggest ‘--list-profiles’.  Hopefully that makes a
centralized ~/.guix-extra-profiles less necessary, but either way, it’s
good in the cookbook to have a discussion of the various ways you can do
things and the various tradeoffs that ensue.

Would you like to turn that into a section of the Cookbook?

Note that it’s (still!) not on-line, but I’ll try to update the
berlin.scm configuration (in maintenance.git) so that it’s published, if
nobody beats me at it.

Thanks!

Ludo’.