Re: User-profile search paths should include system-profile directories

[Alex Kost]

Ludovic Courtès (2016-09-14 16:58 +0200) wrote:

> Hello,
>
> address@hidden (Carlos Sánchez de La Lama) skribis:
>
>> I have an interesting case here. I have guile installed in my system
>> profile, so that
>>
>> /var/guix/profiles/system/profile/share/aclocal/guile.m4
>>
>> is there. However, autoconf is installed in my *user* profile, so
>> ACLOCAL_PATH is augmented in ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile to include
>>
>> ~/.guix-profile/share/aclocal
>>
>> But not the system-profile aclocal directory, which would be put into
>> ACLOCAL_PATH by /var/guix/profiles/system/profile/etc/profile if
>> autoconf was installed in the systme profile as well.
>>
>> Is this the intended behaviour? I am wondering whether packages with
>> search paths should include both the user-profile directories and the
>> system-profile ones.
>
> I think you’re right.  This was discussed at
> <http://bugs.gnu.org/20255>, leading to a patch (for GuixSD).
>
> However, we failed to build consensus around the approach of this patch,
> so we did not apply it.  If you have ideas, please email
> address@hidden  :-)

I think I was the one who prevents the consensus.  To make it clear, I'm
for the suggested solution, but only *after* giving a user a freedom to
avoid loading such a heavy command as "guix package --search-paths".  On
a "usual" GNU/Linux distro a user can edit /etc/profile, but on GuixSD
it is not possible currently.  That's why I think there should be
provided a possibility to override /etc/profile at first.

> One of the fruits of this discussion, though, is that you can do:
>
>   guix package -p /run/current-system/profile -p ~/.guix-profile 
> --search-paths
>
> to get the combined search paths.

This is what I do to combine my profiles (I don't use ~/.guix-profile
but several other profiles instead).

-- 
Alex