Subject: bug#56076: guix shell -P behavior is surprising with persistent home

From: Maxime Devos <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2022 12:50:06 +0200

> On another distro, you might have to set SSL_CERT_DIR manually.  It’s
> not that big of a deal, or at least not really worse.

On other distros, that's sufficient because they only have global
installation, in /etc/ssl/certs. So I don't think it's a good
comparison, given that Guix is all about user-level and occassionally
ad-hoc "guix shell".

Ludovic Courtès schreef op di 28-06-2022 om 09:43 [+0200]:
> > My patch <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/55297> could be considered a
> > work-around, but at least it's automatic for the users, users don't
> > need to remember random Guix bug facts.
> 
> If we start adding such workarounds, where do we stop?  Someone will
> want to have similar workarounds for TERMINFO_DIRS; do we add that to
> each and every package that uses ncurses?  What about
> GST_PLUGIN_PATH?

Sounds good.

> So far, we’ve addressed those by special-casing

That seems equally workaround to me?  Though way less work so sounds
good, except for it being rejected in the past.

> a few key variables in /etc/profile on Guix System and similarly in
> the file generated by the install script on foreign distros.
> 
> Maybe we could do the same with SSL_CERT_DIR?

Shouldn't this be $GUIX_ENVIRONMENT/etc/profile instead of
/etc/profile?  Otherwise, it wouldn't have any effect on "guix shell".
Also, I believe I have proposed making some other variables behave like
$PATH as well, but you rejected it for being special-cased and magic.

Greetings,
Maxime.