Re: Guix days guix home discussion

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 12:59:53AM +0100, Gábor Boskovits wrote:
> On guix days in the guix home discussion the following observations were
> made:
> 1. It is rare that guix home import does the right thing (it is usually
> removing some startup file customizations, does not seem to arrange to pick
> up profiles, not even its own). Either we should improve it, or document
> that it only gives a skeleton configuration and add some guidance on the
> steps needed to get a working one.
> 2. The user default profile and the home package profile being separate is
> causing some issues. It might be enough to document all the special
> profiles somewhere (which as of now include at least system profile, user
> profile, pull profile and home profile), but we can also think about a bit
> more general solution, along the lines of a home service that ensures that
> a given profile matches the supplied manifest, and have variables for the
> special profiles. (These could then provide extensions to the shell
> services which could arrange to pick them up)

In the past we had some issues with various assumptions in guix that
~/.guix-profile was the main profile and we had to add additional
use-cases for ~/.guix-home. I'm not sure if we've gotten all of them
yet.

It also might be helpful to consider something along the lines of
exposing the symlink service bits from the home service modules and see
if it would be a good idea to offer adding a symlink from
~/.guix-home/profile to ~/.guix-profile.  Or (magically) adjusting
~/.guix-profile/etc/profile to also source ~/.guix-home/profile if it
exists.

> 3. Sometime on home reconfigure the shell prompt customizations seem to get
> lost. Sourcing the shell startup file fixes it. I will have to look into
> this more to file a proper bug report.
> 4. Creating a guix development environment service would be beneficial, to
> showcase the possibilities and to simplify onboarding. On top of there
> could be an additional service that adds emacs integration to this
> development environment.

Also on the topic of onboarding to guix-home, the etc-skel service now
also includes a bare-bones guix-home file.  It lives in
/etc/skel/guix-home-config.scm on Guix System.

> 5. There was a recommendation to relax the expectations on the home
> services merged. Right now a lot of people are just writing services for
> private use. Most probably such a single usecase service would already be
> beneficial to multiple people. The idea is the following: make it easy for
> an initial home service to be merged. (Example: do not ask to implement
> options that the submitter is not using). Then take care that if there is
> an addition to the service that it really gets merged with what we already
> have. This needs a bit of up front design, we have to make sure that the
> services can be extended while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Seeing how often we add an extra-config field for just about every other
service I don't think that should be a hindrance.

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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