Re: Package Installation Queries

[Carlo Zancanaro]

On Wed, Feb 08 2017, Niall Dooley wrote
> (2) In terms of Emacs, do fellow Guix users install all packages via Guix
> instead of the traditional ELPA, MELPA route. I suspect they do as I guess
> that is the point. But I ask for advice as my 'pre-guix' emacs config makes
> heavy use of the use-package macro installing all third party packages to
> ~/.emacs.d/elpa . I guess I could add the 'guix-emacs' site-lisp directory
> for each guix installed package to the load-path specifying this in each
> specific use-package package declaration. Is that what others do?

I install all of my Emacs packages via Guix, but in an usual way. I have
written a script which takes in a list of Emacs packages that I want to
install, then uses the Elpa importer to generate a Guix package (the
scheme data structure) which I can build using `guix package -f`. Each
time I run the script it pulls the most recent version on Melpa, so it's
not reproducible, but I get the ability to use Guix for roll-backs (and
in theory I think I could archive my configuration and import it on
another machine, but I haven't tried that).

The biggest advantage to me is actually that I can look at the source of
one of my installed Emacs packages without having to worry that I'll
accidentally modify my installed version. This is what motivated me to
use my current method (as ridiculous as that sounds).

I have attached my script. It won't run on a normal Guix installation
because it uses symbols from (guix import elpa) which are not exported,
but on my machine I have exported more things from (guix import elpa) in
order to use them in my script. I've been meaning to submit a patch for
this, but I haven't yet done so.

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> (3) Before installing Guix I used SCP as my font for Emacs. However,
> following the installation of SCP via Guix some unicode glyphs are not
> rendered correctly as they were before. Note, I did a fresh install of my
> *foreign* distro before installing Guix and did not re-install SCP on it.
> Is there further steps I need to perform to have these unicode glyphs
> rendered correctly?

I had an issue where my font didn't render unicode glyphs in Emacs. I
was using font-dejavu and I had to also install font-gnu-unifont to get
unicode things to render.

> (4) I wish to manage my dotfiles with GNU stow. Traditionally, I understand
> people create a dotfiles directory say under $HOME and create the various
> subdirectories in this directory from which the symlinks are produced. Is
> this approach still the same with GNU stow installed via Guix or is the
> 'stow' directory created elsewhere?

I use Stow to manage my dotfiles and my workflow under Guix is exactly
the same as it was in debian.

I hope that helps!

Carlo

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