Here's my experience with guix-as-a-package-manager, fontconfig and multiple
profiles.
If fonts are installed in a profile different than the default one,
applications do not pick them up out of the box. I.e. icecat shows characters
as squares and you cannot select a cool non standard font in your GTK Emacs.
After digging into this matter, I concluded that the culprit is the main config
file situated in some-nondefault-guix-profile/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
Here's a snippet:
-------------------------
<!-- Font directory list -->
<dir>/gnu/store/7y3lvk3xf4im8n44337mc6y0ccysvfia-font-dejavu-2.37/share/fonts</dir>
<dir>~/.guix-profile/share/fonts</dir>
<dir>/run/current-system/profile/share/fonts</dir>
<dir prefix="xdg">fonts</dir>
<!-- the following element will be removed in the future -->
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
---------------------------
Clearly, some-nondefault-guix-profile/share/fonts is not among the list of dirs
that are searched for font definitions. I'd call this a bug, but maybe it's by
design. Still, shouldn't guix package definitions respect the -p flag to
package command?
Anyway, the workaround is the following. See this snippet of the same config
file,
----------------------------
<!--
Load local system customization file
-->
<include ignore_missing="yes">conf.d</include>
<!-- Font cache directory list -->
-----------------------------
This means it includes the conf files in ...profile/etc/conf.d. The README file
reveals that 5?-*.conf files are used for additional customisation. This makes
50-user.conf particularly interesting. And, here it is ...
-----------------------------
<include ignore_missing="yes" prefix="xdg">fontconfig/conf.d</include>
<include ignore_missing="yes"
prefix="xdg">fontconfig/fonts.conf</include>
<!-- the following elements will be removed in the future -->
<include ignore_missing="yes" deprecated="yes">~/.fonts.conf.d</include>
<include ignore_missing="yes" deprecated="yes">~/.fonts.conf</include>
-----------------------------
Apparently , ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (xdg prefix being ~/.config) is
the place to add some more config
After creating ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf with the following content
-----------------------------
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
<fontconfig>
<its:rules xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its"; version="1.0">
<its:translateRule translate="no"
selector="/fontconfig/*[not(self::description)]"/>
</its:rules>
<description>Default configuration file</description>
<!-- Font directory list -->
<dir>~/.guix-pillars/pillar/share/fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>
------------------------------
and running fc-cache -rvf the fontconfig-aware programs were able to select
fonts from the non-default guix profile.
Hope this helps (me again in six monts from now)!
T
