From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] $HOME/.guix-profile considered harmful.
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:47:48 +0200
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To: John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org


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