Re: Profiles/manifests-related command line interface enhancements

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Pierre,

Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> writes:

> While playing with multiple profiles and manifests and discussing with
> a couple of people in the community, I collected a number of usability
> issues with Guix when it comes to managing multiple profiles and dealing
> with manifests.
>
> Ideas for new features, more or less from most important to least
> important:
>
> - Activate a profile with =guix activate /path/to/profile=.
>   Right now, the most appropriate way to activate a profile is
>
> GUIX_PROFILE="$profile" ; . "$profile"/etc/profile

Due to the way environment variables work, there's no way to implement
your proposed interface, at least not without changing 'guix' from a
normal program into a Bash shell function.  Programs are unable to
change the environment variable settings of the parent shell that
launched them.

However, we could provide a Bash shell function (with a different name)
that provides conveniences like this.  Users of other shells would not
be able to use the Bash shell function, though.  Ideally, we'd provide
shell functions with a similar interface for several popular shells.
I'm not sure if it's worth it, but it could be done.

      Thanks,
        Mark