Re: Merging wip-guix-home to master

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz> skribis:

> I noticed that the ‘guix home import’ subcommand is included, but I
> think it needs more thought and feedback from people before it makes its
> way into ‘master’; it also seems to lack documentation.

Agreed.  There are a few (very few) exceptions, but in general each
command needs (1) a section in the manual and (2) unit tests and/or
integration tests in a shell script.

Could you submit patches for that?

IWBN if others could do an after-the-fact review of the code, too.

> I just realized that it generates the following service declaration
>
> (service
>  home-bash-service-type
>  (home-bash-configuration
>   (bashrc
>    (list (slurp-file-gexp
>           (local-file "/home/yoctocell/.bashrc"))))))
>
> but when running ‘guix home reconfigure’, the ~/.bashrc file will be
> moved, so when running ‘guix home reconfigure’ for the second time, it
> would read the ~/.bashrc which is itself a symlink to a file the store.
> ‘guix home import’ clearly isn’t in a usable state as of right now…

Also, I argued earlier against ‘slurp-file-gexp’:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2021-06/msg00192.html

I haven’t checked the different service configuration APIs, but I think
we should avoid uses of ‘slurp-file-gexp’ entirely and instead do the
same as in the majority of Guix System services, which is to accept
file-like objects.

Thoughts?  Could you take a look?

Thanks,
Ludo’.