‘guix environment’ vs. ‘.bash_profile’

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

One thing that often trips up newcomers, especially on other distros, is
the interaction of ‘guix environment’ and ‘.bashrc’ etc. when it comes
to setting environment variables.  Often the first experience is “why
doesn’t ‘guix environment’ set environment variables correctly?”.

The manual does explain this in a footnote¹ but let’s face it, people
don’t read footnotes and consistently define environment variables in
the “wrong” shell startup file.

What can we do about that?  Should we invoke the shell such that it
sources our ‘etc/profile’ after its own initialization file?  Any other
ideas?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-environment.html#FOOT10