Re: Guix Paths

[Ricardo Wurmus]

> I am wondering why Guix chose `/var/guix` path instead of
> `/gnu/var/guix` or `/guix/var/guix`, as Nix uses `/nix/var/nix`?

I think there’s no better reason than to say that /var is the
conventional local state directory on GNU systems.

It’s possible to use /gnu/var/guix, of course; on the HPC cluster at the
MDC we use /gnu/var as the localstatedir, but it’s not as convenient as
it may seem, because that directory contains the profile directories,
which need to be user-writable, whereas the rest of /gnu only need to be
writable by the daemon.  This means that we end up mounting the same
directories more than once with different permissions.

Users can pick anything for the localstatedir during the configure step
and “guix pull” should respect that choice in the long term.

-- 
Ricardo