Subject: Re: bug#53447: [PATCH] doc: Unset environment variables considered harmful

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2022 08:39:29 +0100

Hi,

Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I think there are too many examples to exhaustively list them all, but
> to give an example, [1, 2, 3, 4] are all the same bug and in [2] Carlo
> said we should document this under "Application Setup".  My personal
> stance is that the Guix behaviour is not a bug and other distros are
> weird for not explicitly binding it.

How about focusing specifically on XDG_DATA_DIRS, which is the root
cause of the first two bugs you mention?

We could say that installing certain packages will cause
~/.guix-profile/etc/profile to define XDG_DATA_DIRS, that this can
interfere with software installed outside Guix, such as GNOME, and that
we recommend unsetting XDG_DATA_DIRS (is that what we recommend?
breaking Guix-installed packages instead of breaking distro-installed
packages?)?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

> [1] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/26202
> [2] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/45360
> [3] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/48300
> [4] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/53379