Re: [PATCH] $HOME/.guix-profile considered harmful.

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org> writes:

> I have my /home NFS mounted (not uncommon in large networks, I think).
> Unfortunately this does not play nicely with guix's convention of setting
> $PATH &c to $HOME/.guix-profile and then linking $HOME/.guix-profile to
> %state-directory/profiles/per-user/$USER/guix_profile - for the obvious reason
> that %state-directory could be different on each workstation - in which case
> $HOME/.guix-profile will be a dead link.
>
> I'm not sure exactly what benefit the ~/.guix-profile convention brings us, except
> perhaps that it is easy to remember.
>
> I'd like to see the ability to have GuixSD deployable in medium-large intranets
> where home (and /var/mail) are remotely mounted filesystems.  Hence I suggest that
> $HOME/.guix-profile is deprecated.

We use Guix on workstations and the cluster at the institute where I
work.  On the cluster /home is mounted via NFS.

Guix does not set PATH to $HOME/.guix-profile automatically.  Users have
to do this on their own.  (On GuixSD this is automatic.)

I find “$HOME/.guix-profile” very useful.  When set up it will always
point to the user’s current Guix profile on the machine.  If you want to
harmonize this across all machines then not only /home should be mounted
via NFS but also the store along with its localstatedir.  This is how
it’s done at the MDC, for example.

~~ Ricardo