Questions about guix handling emacs packages

[Fredrik Salomonsson]

Hi,

Thought I should try letting guix handle the emacs packages. And overall it
worked out great. But encounter some minor issues along the way, so I
thought I should ask.

1) The manual mention that packages installed via guix will be picked up by
emacs from the EMACSLOADPATH which is set when emacs is installed. That was
not the case for me. I needed to manually set:

export EMACSLOADPATH=$GUIX_PROFILE/share/emacs/site-lisp:$EMACSLOADPATH

for it to work.  I'm running guix on a foreign distro and I'm using
emacs-next. Is one of those the reason for it?

2) Not all packages I use in emacs are packaged up in guix (yet). And some
did not work properly for me. So I still need to rely on emacs to install
some of the packages. The issue is, that it doesn't seem that emacs knows
about the packages installed via guix when it comes to installing packages.
Even though it can load them just fine.

For example emacs-dash which I have installed via my manifest but is also
one that gets installed by emacs. If I run emacs -Q and then M-x
describe-package dash. It gives me

Package dash is dependency.

     Status: Installed in ‘dash-20200426.2244/’ (unsigned).
    Version: 20200426.2244
    Summary: A modern list library for Emacs
Required by: ts-20191010.210, org-super-agenda-20200310.1337,
magit-20200522.1028, ht-20200217.2331, git-commit-20200516.2016
   Keywords: lists
 Maintainer: Magnar Sveen <address@hidden>
     Author: Magnar Sveen <address@hidden>
Other versions: 20200426.2244 (melpa), 2.17.0 (melpa-stable), 2.12.0 (gnu).

If I remove my elpa directory in my user-emacs-directory where emacs
installs the packages. It wont find dash when I do describe-package. But if
I run (require 'dash) it will find and load dash. Unsetting EMACSLOADPATH
and it will fail to find dash.

Is this the expected behavior? From what I can tell from reading the manual
[1], external packages must be listed in `package-directory-list` and have
the same layout as the one installed in elpa. Which is not the case when
installing via guix, as everything is symlinked to
$GUIX_PROFILE/share/emacs/site-lisp.

I hope this isn't too much off topic and apologize if any of this has been
asked before (I couldn't find the answer when searching the mailing list
archive).

Thanks

1:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Package-Files.html#Package-Files
-- 
s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g

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