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Re: Package recommended environment variables
From: |
Tobias Geerinckx-Rice |
Subject: |
Re: Package recommended environment variables |
Date: |
Thu, 16 May 2019 13:21:12 +0200 |
Tk,
Tk wrote:
When installing packages, I often get warnings about adding
variables to .profile .
Which warnings are these? Are you sure that's what they mean?
Something like ‘the following variable definitions might be
needed’ doesn't mean you should go edit your .profile, but you're
far from the first to do so. They are printed because guix cannot
change the environment of the shell that invoked it, so ‘guix
install foo; foo’ won't work if foo needs a certain environment
variable to be set. It will work if you open a new shell. That's
a Unix limitation¹.
There was some talk about rephrasing that warning, but IIRC that
was difficult to do without making other assumptions. I don't
know if anything came of it.
These warnings, however, get easily lost when installing bunch
of stuff automatically. Is there a way of extracting this info
again? Should I grep through package definitions?
Grepping won't help since these variables (‘search paths’) are
almost always propagated from dependencies, such as glib. Take a
look at the ‘--search-paths’ argument to ‘guix package’. It will
probably do what you want. Note that it's not limited to a single
package.
However, why are you interested in this information?
- If it's because you're manually adding variables to .profile:
don't; Guix already takes care of this automatically, you should
simply source <guix-profile>/etc/profile if you aren't already.
- If it's because you're using an incompatible shell and are
maintaining your own ‘port’ of that file: you're *probably*
better off with a simple ‘bash -c ". guix-profile/etc/profile &&
exec myshell"’ wrapper.
- If it's because Guix's …/etc/profile is otherwise lacking for
you, please let us know why.
Kind regards,
T G-R
[1]: There are horrible ways to fake this but let's not.
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