Re: Should guix-emacs-autoload-packages use GUIX_ENVIRONMENT?

[Alex Kost]

Kyle Meyer (2017-07-22 21:39 -0400) wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I noticed that Emacs packages from the user's profile leak into guix
> environment calls.

As for me, this is a natural behaviour.  If you want to be safe from any
external packages, site settings, etc., run "emacs -Q".

> For example, when I run
>
>     $ guix environment --pure --ad-hoc emacs -- emacs -q
>
> load-path contains the Emacs packages from my main profile.

Right, but "-q" is not enough here.  If you don't want these packages to
be autoloaded, you need to run emacs with "-Q" or "--no-site-file".

> I expected it to use GUIX_ENVIRONMENT instead (something like the patch
> below, I think).

I wouldn't expect "instead", I would expect "along with".

> Does guix-emacs-autoload-packages ignore GUIX_ENVIRONMENT by design?

No, I think it's just that no one thought about this possibility before (I
mean a possibility to use emacs packages from "guix environment").

> I suppose one downside of honoring GUIX_ENVIRONMENT is that, if the --pure
> flag isn't passed and the package arguments aren't Emacs-related, a user
> may be surprised that their Emacs packages are no longer available in
> newly created Emacs instances.

I'm not sure.  I think if you run "emacs -q", you really want "emacs -Q".
Otherwise, if you start emacs normally, you probably don't want to ignore
emacs packages from your guix profile.

However, I agree that GUIX_ENVIRONMENT should be honored, but as I wrote
*not instead* but *along with* the default profiles.  So if you start
emacs like this:

  guix environment --ad-hoc emacs emacs-wget -- emacs

it should contain emacs-wget in its load-path.  WDYT?

-- 
Alex