Re: Eliminate environment variable hints?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Andreas,

> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 10:56:13PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> when installing a package into a profile Guix very helpfully tells you
>> that you may need to set certain environment variables.  It doesn’t tell
>> you that these environment variables can also be set by source’ing the
>> generated etc/profile file.
>
> something I noticed is that I see these recommendations also when the
> environment variables are already set, precisely by sourcing the (previous)
> $HOME/.guix-profile/etc/profile. Now the profile changed, so they need to
> be re-sourced (which I usually do by calling "bash" from bash, since I source
> from the .bashrc).
>
> On the other hand, using the recommended environment variables would survive
> profile changes, since they look like
>    export 
> PATH="/home/andreas/.guix-profile/bin:/home/andreas/.guix-profile/sbin${PATH:+:}$PATH"
> instead of pointing to /gnu/store/...-profile/bin with a particular hash.
>
> So the two are clearly not equivalent. Which of them is actually
> preferable? I find it a bit confusing that after running
> "guix package -i hello" I cannot run "hello" immediately, unlike in
> Debian.

This only needs to be done when GUIX_PROFILE is not set.  The
definitions in etc/profile either reference /gnu/store directories
directly (when GUIX_PROFILE is not set) or they reference the profile
links (when GUIX_PROFILE is set).

When GUIX_PROFILE is set an environment variable like PATH that is
already set to the profile’s “bin” directory will not have to be defined
again after installing another executable.

--
Ricardo