Re: Multiple profiles with Guix Home

[Maxime Devos]

Liliana Marie Prikler schreef op di 03-05-2022 om 20:34 [+0200]:
> > Also, cross-profile package installation can be error-prone, for
> > example if user install an emacs in main profile and emacs packages
> > in emacsy profile we will end up in a situation, where those emacs
> > package aren't available in Emacs.  Probably some other issues will
> > become clearer during implementation.
> The solution to that would be evaluating the search paths over all
> enabled packages.  However, I do think it's fine to do as we did
> before
> for now; people are already used to this aspect of Guix,

They shouldn't have to be.  If there's a problem in the past that
doesn't mean that it isn't a problem in the present anymore.  Also,
while I'm aware of this problem, it's only due to having looked at some
Guix code, I don't mix profiles so I wouldn't have seen this problem
otherwise.  But if I didn't know the internals, started using Guix Home
and saw some recommendation to split profiles, then I could end up with
inscrutenable errors.

> but the fact that they need to code up their own shell wrappers to
> manage multiple profiles is not good optics imo.

They don't have to code up shell wrappers or split profiles.  They can
just use a single profile.

> [...].  If you do split your home in multiple
> profiles however, you will benefit from faster union builds, which
> themselves have quadratic complexity as a lower bound.

Instead of working around quadratic behaviour, could we just make it
linear behaviour?  Also, why would the user need to split things,
couldn't Guix do that automatically?

Greetings,
Maxime.

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