Re: Merging ‘wip-newt-installer’ in master?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mathieu Othacehe <address@hidden> skribis:

>> Now, why does the default value of LANG matter anyway?  I mean, the
>> installer starts out with a default language, presumably English, right?
>> So you can simply add, say, (setenv "LC_ALL" "en_US.utf8") when starting
>> the installer, can’t you?
>
> Yup its a way, but in the higly improbable case we want to distribute
> install images with the 'locale' field of 'installation-os' set to
> something else than en_US.utf8, then LANG matters. I found a hack
> consisting in loading everything in /etc/environment just before
> starting the installer but I'm not very proud of it!

Heheh.  Another option would be to pass the locale name to the installer
right from (gnu system install).  That way, if people want to build an
image with a different default locale, they can do it.

Fundamentally though, it’s the installer’s job to offer a choice of
languages early on, which it does pretty well already!

> I just pushed to wip-newt-installer some commits. Most of what you
> described in points 1, 2 and 3 should be ok. The part, I'm not sure
> about and I would like you to have a look is the (guix self) part. I'm
> not sure I understand the point of having a *installer-modules*
> scheme-node if we don't want to build and distribute the installer via
> (guix self).
>
> So what I did is removing (gnu system install) from *system-modules* so
> that, all references to the installer is absent from (guix self), but
> maybe it's not the right thing to do.

I think we want to distribute (gnu installer …) modules, just not build
them.  The thing is, they should be “build-side only” modules, and thus
we don’t need to compile them; it’s like (guix man-db), for instance.

So I think gnu/installer/*.scm could go in the *system-modules* node as
#:extra-files.

Does that make sense?

Thanks,
Ludo’.