Re: overriding essential-services

[Alex Kost]

Ricardo Wurmus (2017-08-15 22:05 +0200) wrote:

> Alex Kost <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Ricardo Wurmus (2017-08-11 22:26 +0200) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Guix,
>>>
>>> I want to make sure that /etc/environment includes GUILE_LOAD_PATH and
>>> GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH, because that’s needed for offloading.
>>> “/etc/environment” is created by the “session-environment-service”
>>> service, which is part of “essential-services”.  It is not part of
>>> %base-services, so I cannot catch it with “modify-services” and extend
>>> it.
>>>
>>> How would I go about extending it?
>>
>> There is probably no convenient way now.
>>
>>> For now I’ll use ~/.ssh/environment and “PermitUserEnvironment=yes”, but
>>> I think it would anyway be good to have a mechanism to easily change the
>>> contents of /etc/environment.
>>
>> IFIUC the intention of <https://bugs.gnu.org/27155> is to provide the
>> extension facility for any service.
>
> I don’t know… I never quite warmed up to the implementation.  It looks
> much too powerful for something as simple as e.g. overwriting
> /etc/environment.
>
> Maybe “session-environment-service-type” is an outlier here anyway.  I
> see the utility of 27155 for the other services, but using it for
> “session-environment-service-type” really seems wrong.  Maybe we can
> move it to %base-services?
>
> And maybe we could avoid essential-services altogether and make these
> services explicit, so that they can be modified with “modify-services”.
> Right now they are special in that they are always added to whatever
> services the user defines.

I agree!  I always vote for providing users a freedom to shoot
themselves in their feet.  The more ways to customize various aspects of
a system there are, the better.  So I think that moving as much services
as possible (from essential-services to base-services) would be great.

-- 
Alex