Re: 01/01: services: Add ‘/usr/bin/env’ special file.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Using a custom script with a /usr/bin/env shebang is pretty common.  You
> don’t need to be a power user for that, and certainly not a *Guix* power
> user.

Like I wrote in <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/35910#2> and in the
message it refers to, although I was initially mildly reluctant to
having /usr/bin/env by default, I’ve come to think that lack of
/usr/bin/env is a gratuitous annoyance—not to me of course, but to
newcomers as we’ve seen repeatedly, be they seasoned GNU/Linux users or
not.

With that in mind, adding /usr/bin/env by default is probably a good move.

Now, we can add a snippet in the manual with the ‘modify-services’ trick
to remove /usr/bin/env.  :-)

> The argument that /usr/bin/env could make software work by accident when
> testing on a Guix System is not very convincing to me.  We don’t have
> /bin/sh or /usr/bin/env in the build environment.  Software behaviour is
> also affected by the presence of /usr, /lib, /bin, etc, and these can
> all exist at runtime.  We assume that building in an isolated
> environment is usually sufficient; and yet we sometimes find that
> applications behave differently when run inside of containers
> (e.g. applications that call out to coreutils that are usually available
> in a normal system).

Yeah.

Well anyway, if we take a step back, we’re talking about a really tiny
issue in the grand scheme of things, and it’s certainly not worth losing
our hair over it.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.