$HOME/.guix-profile considered harmful.

I have my /home NFS mounted (not uncommon in large networks, I think).
Unfortunately this does not play nicely with guix's convention of setting
$PATH &c to $HOME/.guix-profile and then linking $HOME/.guix-profile to
%state-directory/profiles/per-user/$USER/guix_profile - for the obvious reason
that %state-directory could be different on each workstation - in which case
$HOME/.guix-profile will be a dead link.

I'm not sure exactly what benefit the ~/.guix-profile convention brings us, except
perhaps that it is easy to remember.

I'd like to see the ability to have GuixSD deployable in medium-large intranets
where home (and /var/mail) are remotely mounted filesystems.  Hence I suggest that
$HOME/.guix-profile is deprecated.

The following patch fixes part of the problem on my system.
---
 gnu/system.scm | 25 ++++++++++++++-----------
 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

John Darrington writes:

> I have my /home NFS mounted (not uncommon in large networks, I think).
> Unfortunately this does not play nicely with guix's convention of setting
> $PATH &c to $HOME/.guix-profile and then linking $HOME/.guix-profile to
> %state-directory/profiles/per-user/$USER/guix_profile - for the obvious reason
> that %state-directory could be different on each workstation - in which case
> $HOME/.guix-profile will be a dead link.
>
> I'm not sure exactly what benefit the ~/.guix-profile convention brings us, except
> perhaps that it is easy to remember.
>
> I'd like to see the ability to have GuixSD deployable in medium-large intranets
> where home (and /var/mail) are remotely mounted filesystems.  Hence I suggest that
> $HOME/.guix-profile is deprecated.

Hm, considered harmful, I dunno.  It seems a bit strong!  Something does
feel useful to me about having it in $HOME.  It seems like the logical
place to me, since it's per-user.

But I can see the merits of moving it to the %state-directory.
Eventually Debian + Guix stopped working with my GuixSD setup.  It might
have been nice to have a separate store location altogether.

Still, this switch feels very strange to me.  $HOME feels... like the
right thing.  Which I guess isn't a very good explaination.

> Hm, considered harmful, I dunno.  It seems a bit strong!  Something does
> feel useful to me about having it in $HOME.  It seems like the logical
> place to me, since it's per-user.

It's a good thing for the user to have, but IMHO it's also a good thing that the
system do not rely on it being there, and only rely on %state-directory.

I think the patch is a good idea, but I wouldn't remove the $HOME/.guix-profile
symlink. So you keep the best of both worlds.

Just my uneducated 2cts feeling...

John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org> writes:

> I have my /home NFS mounted (not uncommon in large networks, I think).
> Unfortunately this does not play nicely with guix's convention of setting
> $PATH &c to $HOME/.guix-profile and then linking $HOME/.guix-profile to
> %state-directory/profiles/per-user/$USER/guix_profile - for the obvious reason
> that %state-directory could be different on each workstation - in which case
> $HOME/.guix-profile will be a dead link.
>
> I'm not sure exactly what benefit the ~/.guix-profile convention brings us, except
> perhaps that it is easy to remember.
>
> I'd like to see the ability to have GuixSD deployable in medium-large intranets
> where home (and /var/mail) are remotely mounted filesystems.  Hence I suggest that
> $HOME/.guix-profile is deprecated.

We use Guix on workstations and the cluster at the institute where I
work.  On the cluster /home is mounted via NFS.

Guix does not set PATH to $HOME/.guix-profile automatically.  Users have
to do this on their own.  (On GuixSD this is automatic.)

I find “$HOME/.guix-profile” very useful.  When set up it will always
point to the user’s current Guix profile on the machine.  If you want to
harmonize this across all machines then not only /home should be mounted
via NFS but also the store along with its localstatedir.  This is how
it’s done at the MDC, for example.

~~ Ricardo

Hello,

John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org> skribis:

> I have my /home NFS mounted (not uncommon in large networks, I think).
> Unfortunately this does not play nicely with guix's convention of setting
> $PATH &c to $HOME/.guix-profile and then linking $HOME/.guix-profile to
> %state-directory/profiles/per-user/$USER/guix_profile - for the obvious reason
> that %state-directory could be different on each workstation - in which case
> $HOME/.guix-profile will be a dead link.

It’s true that %state-directory could differ on each machine.  I think
it’s uncommon though.

I understand your concern, but I agree with Ricardo that what you
suggest is not strictly required: commonly (my guess), people having
/home on NFS won’t have the problem you describe.

> I'm not sure exactly what benefit the ~/.guix-profile convention brings us, except
> perhaps that it is easy to remember.

… and easy to type, and quite “natural”.  These are the main reasons I
guess, but they’re quite important.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.