Re: Dealing with environment settings on a non-Guix distribution

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Pjotr,

> @FOSDEM one thing came up that we ought to make it easier to handle
> environment settings (shell variables). Yesterday, I had to help
> somenone use R and install some packages in $HOME. This proved quite
> hairy. Mostly because we needed to tell R about certificates in
> /etc/ssl, change the native download from curl to wget, and to tell R
> about library paths for dependencies on openssl, for example. Not
> something you'd like a non-guixer try to figure out.

Yes, this is something that need simplification.  The most common
settings required are

    * GUIX_LOCPATH
      depends on “glibc-locales” or “glibc-utf8-locales”
    * GIT_SSL_CAINFO, SSL_CERT_FILE, SSL_CERT_DIR
      depend on “nss-certs” or a system-wide cert store

On foreign distros it would be nice to handle these things
semi-automatically.  Installing “glibc-locales” does not automatically
set GUIX_LOCPATH; nor do GIT_SSL_CAINFO, SSL_CERT_FILE, and SSL_CERT_DIR
get set when installing “nss-certs”.  These are the only things I can
think of right now that need to be set manually at the MDC.  Pretty much
everything else is handled by “source $GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile” (which
we do in a global shell initialisation file).

I never had to make R switch from curl to wget or to tell it about
additional library paths.  Could you elaborate on why this is needed in
your case?  Is there a problem we should fix in our R package?

> For Ruby I created a script in
>
>   https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/scripts/ruby-guix-env
>
> (actually it is out of date, I also deal with certificates).
>
> I think we can have more of these 'environment' managing scripts. Can
> we somehow get them into Guix? Maybe create a separate package for
> each of them - say ruby-guix-env and r-guix-env? It would help
> bootstrap people using Guix for R, ruby and other languages.

If we go down this road of offering environment files I’d rather have
something generic.  Ideally, our packages would *just work* after
setting common environment variables, such as those mentioned above.

--
Ricardo

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