Re: Subdirectories in GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Christopher Baines <address@hidden> writes:

> Recently I had problems with the way GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH was working with
> govuk-guix [1]. Currently, I'm using a separate directory for the
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH that contains symlinks to a subset of the Guile
> modules necessary for the packages in the repository.
>
> I think support (whether intentional or otherwise) for this approach was
> removed in [2].

Looks like this was removed in an attempt to improve performance over
NFS.  The “scheme-files” procedure now includes a comment:

  ;; XXX: We don't recurse if we find a symlink.

Would it not be better to fix this instead of adding support for special
syntax in GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH?

> I've attached a rough patch that sets this up, such that you can do
> something like:
>
>   export GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH="/tmp/foo^bar/baz:/tmp/cats"
>
> Where ^ acts as the separator, and bar/baz is the subdirectory.

I sympathize with the desire to work around this problem, but for some
reason I really don’t like adding special notation to path variables.
(“texmf.cnf” of TeX Live has a similar feature where e.g. a trailing
“//” indicates recursion.)

--
Ricardo

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