Re: Running guix on nixos

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Jeff Mickey <j@codemac.net> skribis:

> And I got an idea while replying to your mail. NixOS sets the
> NIX_CONF_DIR environment variable for users, and it looks like the guix
> command respects it and places the acl file in /etc/nix/acl.

Indeed.

> The guix-daemon however is being launched from systemd, and it looks
> like nix doesn't set up those same environment variables for services?
>
> $ sudo systemctl show-environment
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
>
> Well, fek.
>
> guix-daemon defaults to using whatever guix was compiled with, and as
> this is the binary installation method, so it was probably compiled with
> /etc/guix.
>
> I apologize, an environmental mess up.
>
> It seems that running guix on top of NixOS has much more interesting
> edge cases compared to my previous arch+guix and debian+guix installs
> due to the overlap in functionality of the distros. Those others were a
> breeze compared to this.

Well, it seems that the main issue is that Guix honors the same
environment variables as Nix, which causes confusion.

We should probably fix it.

> Is there anywhere I can document putting guix on NixOS from binary
> installation? It'd be nice to have a per-distro "how to install guix"
> instructions for each's corner case.

I’d rather avoid per-distro sections.  The “Application Setup” section
is meant to contain all the hints for using Guix on a “foreign distro”,
and those hints should be pretty much the same on all distros.

So I think the problems you found with NixOS indicate that we must fix
the environment variable collisions.

Ĝoja kodado!  :-)

Ludo’.