bug#74980: Home container do not instantiate ~/.guix-profile

bug#74980: Home container do not instantiate ~/.guix-profile

[Gabriel Wicki]

Hi there!

Invoking a home container does not create ~/.guix-profile (which in my case
is symlinked to ~/.guix-home/profile).  This leads to a problem when
testing my Emacs configuration, since I there add
~/.guix-profile/share/emacs/site-lisp to its load path.

I guess referring to ~/.guix-profile seems the smart choice, since it
could also work on home environments where I added the necessary
packages "manually" to my user's profile, so I consider only having
~/.guix-home to be somewhat off.

Any ideas on this?  Is this intended behaviour?  Is my configuration off?

bug#74980: [PATCH] home: container: Create symlink to .guix-home/profile.

[Gabriel Wicki]

* guix/scripts/home.scm: Create the symlink.

Change-Id: Ib299c53f7cd0ca6ad204325b5c150d579224afd7
---
 guix/scripts/home.scm | 4 ++++
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/guix/scripts/home.scm b/guix/scripts/home.scm
index b4c82d275f..50aaf2abf6 100644
--- a/guix/scripts/home.scm
+++ b/guix/scripts/home.scm
@@ -344,6 +344,10 @@ (define* (spawn-home-container home
            (primitive-load (string-append #$home "/activate"))
            (setenv "GUIX_NEW_HOME" #f)
 
+           (system* "ln" "-s"
+                    (string-append #$home-directory "/.guix-home/profile")
+                    (string-append #$home-directory "/.guix-profile"))
+
            (when term
              ;; Preserve TERM for proper interactive use.
              (setenv "TERM" term))

base-commit: c3290cee6add60b7e56f5f919d9498d78542790a
-- 
2.46.0

bug#74980: [PATCH] home: container: Create symlink to .guix-home/profile.

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi,

Gabriel Wicki wrote on 19.12.2024 22:00 (GMT +01:00):
> * guix/scripts/home.scm: Create the symlink.
> 
> Change-Id: Ib299c53f7cd0ca6ad204325b5c150d579224afd7
> ---
>  guix/scripts/home.scm | 4 ++++
>  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/guix/scripts/home.scm b/guix/scripts/home.scm
> index b4c82d275f..50aaf2abf6 100644
> --- a/guix/scripts/home.scm
> +++ b/guix/scripts/home.scm
> @@ -344,6 +344,10 @@ (define* (spawn-home-container home
>             (primitive-load (string-append #$home "/activate"))
>             (setenv "GUIX_NEW_HOME" #f)
>  
> + (system* "ln" "-s"
> + (string-append #$home-directory "/.guix-home/profile")
> + (string-append #$home-directory "/.guix-profile"))

Isn't that dangerous?

What happens if you invoke "guix install xyz" after that?

That would have guix mutate the contents of ~/.guix-profile , even though the .guix-home/profile is derived from a declarative manifest, right?

Or does it at  least only swap out the link for a new .guix-profile directory ?

I'm too much of a chicken to try...

I mean I can see what you mean but I'm not sure that guix expects the user to do that.