Re: quirky behaviour of “guix environment”

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> writes:
>
>> 1.) the environment includes glibc and its executables.  Is this ever
>>     desired?  When loading an environment from a file or from a package
>>     (i.e. when “--ad-hoc” is NOT provided) “guix environment” uses
>>     “package-environment-inputs”, which runs “package->bag” and then
>>     “bag-transitive-inputs”.  The resulting list of packages is then
>>     used as the inputs for a profile derivation.  That seems a bit
>>     excessive.
>>
>>     Would it not be sufficient to use only the direct inputs of the
>>     package as the inputs to the profile derivation?  That way “guix
>>     environment foo” would behave just like “guix environment --ad-hoc
>>     input-a-of-foo input-b-of-foo input-c-of-foo”.
>>
>>     Is there a reason why it creates a whole bag and dumps its contents
>>     into the inputs of the profile derivation?
>
> My interpretation of the intended behavior of "guix environment foo" is
> that is that only the inputs of (the bag of) foo should show up in the
> environment, not the transitive closure of inputs.  I am surprised to
> hear that that is not the case, but perhaps I am missing something.

Yeah, this was also quite a surprise to me.

David, would it be wrong for us to change the behaviour such that only
direct inputs end up in the environment?

Aside from this issue, I find it worrying that the graft for glibc does
not end up in the environment.  This is a serious problem for those
who use “guix environment” on RHEL 6.

Ludo, do you know if this is a more general bug or if it is due to the
design of “guix environment”?

--
Ricardo