Re: Defining user services in Guix.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Mekeor Melire <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

>> And secondly, each user could have a user.scm e.g. like
>>
>>     (user-configuration
>>         ; ...
>>         (aliases
>>             '(
>>                 ("sysrec" "system reconfigure")
>>                 ("pl"     "pull")
>>                 ; ...
>>             ))
>>         (services
>>             (emacs-daemon-service)
>>             (dzen-service)
>>             ; ...
>>             ))
>>
>> or similar :)
>
> While I’m not a fan of Guix-specific aliases, I think it’s not a bad
> idea to use Guix for user configurations.  I’m tired of having to keep
> track of a set of custom configuration files scattered all over the
> place, but I’m not sure how to approach this without going overboard.
>
> To stay on the topic of user services: I think they do have a place in
> Guix and could be defined with the same mechanisms that we have for
> system services.

Agreed.  A ‘guix user’ tool (or similar) could talk to the user’s
Shepherd instance to upgrade user services like
‘upgrade-shepherd-services’ does in (guix scripts system).

For non-Shepherd things, the benefits are less obvious to me.  For
instance, having ~/.bashrc be a simply to /gnu/store/…-bashrc is not
significantly better to having ~/.bashrc link to
~/directory-under-version-control/bashrc.

Anyway, food for thought!

Ludo’.