Foreign distro GUIX_LOCPATH errors when installing from manual

[sbaugh]

Hi,

I was just getting started with Guix by installing it on my regular
distro, Debian Jessie, by following the manual (which is really great -
I tried installing Nix first but couldn't get it to work, the Guix
manual is much better).

The install was successful but I noticed two errors related to
GUIX_LOCPATH which I had to fix by asking others for advice. Both happen
when running guix package commands as a regular user, by running
/usr/local/bin/guix.

- substitute: warning: failed to install locale: Invalid argument

This was a result of the daemon, running as root, not having
GUIX_LOCPATH set in its environment.

My solution was installing glibc-locale in root's profile, and adding:

    Environment=GUIX_LOCPATH=/root/.guix_profile/lib/locale

to the [Service] section of the systemd unit file used to start the
daemon. I suggest that this line should be added to the unit file
shipped with guix, and that the installation instructions say to install
glibc-locale (or some other locale package) in root's profile.

- warning: failed to install locale: Invalid argument

This was a result of the user running guix not having GUIX_LOCPATH set
in their current environment. But, keep in mind, the user is running
guix through /usr/local/bin/guix, which is in fact a symlink to root's
guix.

I suggest that the appropriate solution is to instead of symlinking
/usr/local/bin/guix to
/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix, we should
replace /usr/local/bin/guix with the following shell script:

    #!/bin/sh
    export GUIX_LOCPATH=/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/lib/locale
    /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix $*

That is, root's guix should be run with root's locales.


Hopefully these can be fixed!