Hi, Am Dienstag, dem 24.05.2022 um 14:55 +0300 schrieb Andrew Tropin: > On 2022-05-23 19:05, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote: > > [...] > > I don't think I agree with this choice. To satisfy both my own use > > case of serving profiles in different locations from another and > > another issue being raised w.r.t. configuring the location of the > > .guix-home profile, I think we should make a triple of location, > > optional short name, and manifest (which may be generated from > > packages implicitly). WDYT? > > > > This service is intended for profiles managed by Guix Home, so every > profile MUST be a part of home-environment (~/.guix-home is a symlink > to it). I don't see any meaningful reasons to make it possible to > customize the path inside home-environment. Why though? The decision to restrict Guix Home to dotfiles was already a bad one that has since been overturned, so I think we should carefully evaluate why "~/.guix-home" even is special. In my point of view, any path that is prefixed with the user's home ought to be fair game, as should be constructing intermediate per-user profile symlinks in /var/guix.
> If you want to have profiles like ~/work/my-project/guix-profile or > ~/.guix/profiles/my-python-environment managed by Guix Home you can > implement home-external-profiles-service-type, which can extended > activation service or any other impure tricks, but I would advice > against it. I suggest either manage a profile with > home-[additional-]-profiles or manage them externally and load with > home-profile-paths/home-profile-loader. Pardon me if I was confusing, but I meant to have one service defining the existence of ~/work/my-project/guix-profile (that being home- profiles-service-type) and another to load it (that being home-profile- loader-service-type). Admittedly, the existing way of specifying a profile that is loaded becomes more work then, so perhaps we can add some syntactic sugar to that, so that both services get extended at once. > > Considering the above, I think a rough roadmap would be: > > 1. Implementing home-profiles-service-type (to build the profiles) > > 2. Implementing home-profile-loader-service-type > > This one looks simplier and also independent from #1, so I would > recommend to start with it. Also, it's very likely that > home-profiles-service-type will be extending > home-profile-loader-service-type I thought about it for some while, but I really don't think either is easier than the other, particularly in the way I described it, where home-profiles-service-type and home-profile-loader-service-type are orthogonal to each other. > > 3. ??? > > 4. Deprecate the existing home-profile-service-type in favor of the > > new profile service type pair and/or implement it in terms of it. > > where (1) and (2) could be done by two people/teams in parallel. > > The migration should be quite simple here. > > JFYI: The design of Guix Home is flexible, essential services can be > completely customized, even symlink-manager can be removed or > substituted with something else (for example to make a read-only home > workflow proposed by Julien Lepiller in guix-home-manager). This is > also used in rde to substitute home-shell-profile-service-type with > alternative implementation: > https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/master/item/rde/features.scm#L234 I'm not sure if I'm that fond of this design choice – it reminds me a bit about OOP horrors I was forced to learn. Anyway, I don't think it's relevant, as... > This way you can experiment with multi-profile approach even without > modifying existing code. I was planning to run guix home from checkout with $HOME in /tmp anyway for testing purposes. > > Given that the task has been simplified, I think I might start > > coding on it, but I can't promise any particular deadline. At the > > moments both my day job and review work delay any other > > contributions towards Guix. > > > > Cheers > > I also advice to treat it as an experiment. IMO Guix Home should be > relatively conservative, stable and simple. Other advanced workflows > in most cases should be implemented and maintained separately and be > optionally pluggable in Guix Home by overriding essential services or > any other way. In cases such workflows demonstrates their benifits > without compromising simplicity, they can be included. I initially planned for the new stuff to be backwards compatible by way of sanitizers. That probably still works for the design we have currently, though YMMV. Cheers
