Re: tracking /etc/profile.d/*guix.sh in downstream distributions

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi,

Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com> writes:

> On Friday, May 19, 2023 6:10:53 PM EDT Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>> Philip McGrath recently pointed out that the /etc/profile.d/guix.sh
>> snippet had not been updating in the Guix packaging for Debian:
>> 
>>   https://bugs.debian.org/1036304
>> 
>> (and as bonus complication, was also renamed to zzz-guix.sh)
>> 
>> The reason I never noticed before is because it is actually a manual
>> process, with this script embedded in the sys_create_init_profile()
>> function of etc/guix-install.sh ... and thus easy to miss when updating
>> packaging.
>> 
>> What would be the impact of separating the /etc/profile.d/zzz-guix.sh
>> into a separate file upstream? Would guix-install.sh need to be adjusted
>> to guix-install.sh.in so as to embed the contents of this file?
>> 
>
> I think this would also make it easier for Guix contributors to edit the 
> file. 
> When I sent a patch for it, Ludo’ and I both got to learn about the obscure 
> feature of Bash here documents it uses: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/56050#11
> Ludo’s informal poll results suggest that others would be confused, too:
> https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/108590952454715930
>
>> Alternately, maybe guix-install.sh could be updated to optionally output
>> or generate the zzz-guix.sh file either by passing commandline arguments
>> or some other conditional mechanism?

One problem I see with extracting that from the script (and relying on
the build system to stitch the final script together), is that we then
can't simply link to the repo as we currently do for
https://guix.gnu.org/install.sh or https://guix-install.sh (they simply
point to
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh).

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim