Re: GUIX_LOCPATH in daemon unit file

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Thomas,

> using Guix on Ubuntu, I kept seeing messages “substitute: warning: 
> failed to install locale: Invalid argument” (though apart from this 
> warning, everything seemed to work normally).
>
>  From a previous thread on this mailing list, I learnt that the 
>  problem is that the daemon doesn't have GUIX_LOCPATH set correctly, 
>  but I didn't know how to fix
> this. #guix explained to me that, for systemd users, this can be done 
> by adding "Environment=GUIX_LOCPATH=/root/.guix-profile/lib/locale" 
> to the [Service] section of the guix-daemon.service file. (and 
> probably also installing the necessary locales for root, which I'd 
> already done).
>
> Should this environment setting be added to the default 
> guix-daemon.service, or could this break something for other 
> users/distributions (I'm not sure systems other than Ubuntu have this 
> problem?).

I think GUIX_LOCPATH should be set automatically.  There are no ill
effects of having it set when the directory doesn’t exist AFAIK.  Also,
only Guix honours GUIX_LOCPATH (hence the name), so it shouldn’t screw
up the behaviour of other applications.

This is a problem on all systems where Guix is used as a package
manager.

What do others think?  If it’s okay and my rationalisations above are
not mistaken I’d like to accept this change.

~~ Ricardo