Hi! While the documentation refers to profiles and manifests, it does not tell much of the use cases and the practical benefits.
For users coming from non-functional package managers, it's not really obvious
why we would need profiles.
Regarding manifest, I suppose some people might find them annoying to use
because updating/adding just 1 program means rebuilding the whole profile, which
after a Guix pull can be somewhat lengthy.
So what about writing a blog article / cookbook chapter to explain why
profiles and manifests are truly awesome indeed? (Unless this has
already been done and I missed it?)
A quick 'n' dirty outline:
A manifest can be slow to install if it's too big. But Guix supports profile,
which are perfect to break down manifests into multiple sets of semantically
connected packages.
Example profiles:
- Emacs.
- TeXlive (this one can be really useful when you need to install just one
package for the next document you've received over email).
- Your favourite programming language libraries.
- The dependencies of a project you are working on
- Games :p
We can create a manifest per profile and install them this way:
guix package --manifest=/path/to/guix-dev-manifest.scm
--profile=$HOME/.guix-extra-profiles/dev/dev
Placing all your profiles in a single folder, with each profile getting its own
subfolder is somewhat cleaner, plus it's obvious to "loop over profiles" from
any programming language (e.g. a shell script) by
simply looping over the sub-directories of .guix-extra-profiles.
Note that it's also possible to loop over the output of `guix package
--list-profiles` although you'll probably have to filter out
`~/.config/guix/current`.
To "enable" all profiles on login, add this to your .bash_profile (or .profile
if you don't use bash):
#+begin_src sh
for i in ~/.guix-extra-profiles/*; do
profile=$i/$(basename "$i")
if [ -f "$profile"/etc/profile ]; then
GUIX_PROFILE="$profile" ; . "$profile"/etc/profile
fi
unset profile
done
#+end_src
I like to keep the default ~/.guix-profile manifest-less for trash-away packages
that I would just use for a couple of days.
This way it's easy to just run
guix install FOO
guix upgrade BAR
and I don't have to specify the profile.
Other benefits of manifests:
- No need to generate or maintain a manifest from an ad-hoc profile.
- "guix package -u" will always suggest to update some packages of those have
propagated inputs. Guix manifests avoid this problem.
- "guix package -u [packages...]" may report conflicts which are annoying to
resolve manually. Manifests avoid this problem altogether.
Other benefits of multiple profiles
- It's easy to toggle a specific profile on/off.
- When a profile is off, it's easy to enable it for an individual shell without
"polluting" the rest of the user session:
#+begin_src sh
GUIX_PROFILE="$profile" ; . "$profile"/etc/profile
#+end_src
Happy to hear about your feedback!
Cheers!
--
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/
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