Re: how can I open files through packages installed in different profiles

[Rutherther <rutherther@ditigal.xyz>]

Fcc: ditigal/sent -unread -inbox
Hi G. Preihs,

> 4.
> I realised now, that, when opening Dolphin (KDE) and want to open a 
> file, right click (mouse) it ask me: "open with" , arrow down (right 
> side) it doesn´t show up that package with which I want to open this 
> file. But when writing e.g. libreoffice it opens the file with 
> libreoffice. After doing it once, libreoffice is mentioned in future in 
> this list. Interestingly it opens also with a package, which is located 
> in an other profile and I haven´t open this profile beforehand.
> How that works, I don´t know.

for this, you can try putting the various profiles' share folder
to XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable. I suppose you are already
sourcing the environment variables of all the profiles, but unfortunately
XDG_DATA_DIRS is not propagated. There is a longstanding issue that's still
open about stuff like this. Note that your desktop environment needs to have
this environment variable, so you need to export it in something like a .profile
file or otherwise ensure it's in your DE.

> 5.
> One question remains for me, if I update only one profile and it 
> downloads all the necessary dependences, how that works for the other 
> profiles which I didn´t update, also for the default profile, if I can 
> call it this way.

Most packages shouldn't mind about this. Guix puts them to separate store paths,
and since the profiles for the most part do not interact, there shouldn't be many
problems. But there still can be some, like potentially with qt plugins, glibc locales,
and other stuff. Generally potentially anything that needs some environment variables in the profile,
where multiple profiles use the same ones. But that is not to say that every time they overlap there will
be problems. Take PATH, Guix packages are usually patched or wrapped to refer to runtime dependencies
in the store directly, not to take them from PATH.

Regards,
Rutherther
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2024 15:01:43 +0100
Message-ID: <87ldwrr3qw.fsf@ditigal.xyz>