Re: Better support for single-user systems

[Taylan Kammer <taylan.kammer@gmail.com>]

Clément Lassieur <clement@lassieur.org> writes:

> Hi Taylan,
>
> You don't need to use the root account at all. 
>
> Taylan Kammer <taylan.kammer@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Most desktop users have single unix account and are also in control of
>> root.  These users might not want to differentiate between the current
>> guix version of root and their normal user.  They might also not want
>> to differentiate between the packages available to root and the normal
>> user.  As such I would propose the following two improvements:
>>
>> - Allow a system-wide guix installation that's updated with a special
>>   variant of 'guix pull' executed by root
>
> You can use you current user's guix installation for all commands that
> need root's permissions with 'sudo -E', so you can consider that your
> current user's guix account is the system-wide guix account.
>
> For example, 'sudo -E guix system reconfigure config.scm' updates the
> system with your user's guix.

Aha, thanks, I didn't know about this possibility.

>> - Allow direct addition of packages to the system profile to obviate
>>   the need of running a full 'guix system reconfigure' after adding
>>   packages to the system configuration
>
> You don't need this if you use your user's guix installation only.

Hmm, sometimes I prefer to just log in as root with 'sudo -i' when doing
work where I'll need root privileges repeatedly.  When I do that, my
normal user's packages won't be available.  But I guess 'sudo -E bash'
might be a solution.  I'll try that for now. :-)


Taylan