guix home - have you considered avoiding a single package list? about rde

[abcdw]

Having watched your presentations about guix home this looks like a very exciting development that fits better with the rest of guix. Having looked at your source-code it looks like you are making the assumption that the user uses a single list of packages to be installed as a user-environment.

Correct.

Personally I always dread accidentally triggering a massive update (like compiling Chromium) when I just need one key package updated to get work done. For that reason I wonder whether you have considered splitting the single list of packages into separate ones of related packages? Essentially making the way to manage the installed user packages closer to the manifest model that is this guix blogpost?

I'm aware of this issue and thought about it briefly. It's not technically possible to have few home-environments, because each of them would define the same env variables, run shepherd multiple times and probably will do some other undesired things. Combining profiles is an easy task, while combining home-environments is almost impossible. Imagine having few operating-system declarations work at the same time on the same machine. I see the possibility to manage all the configurations for beefy packages inside home-environment, but install those packages itself with manifest or any other mechanism. It makes it possible to update subsets of packages separately, however will decouple configurations from packages, will make home-environment less reproducible, self-contained and consistent. I don't think this approach is good, but maybe a way to go.

Personally I always dread accidentally triggering a massive update (like compiling Chromium) when I just need one key package updated to get work done.

In most cases when I need to get work done I do not update the system or user profile. per-project profiles is a different story, but they are separate from the home-environment anyway. I see the only one hypothetical and pretty rare case, when it really needed, but for that inferiors can be used.

Having watched your presentations about guix home this looks like a very exciting development that fits better with the rest of guix.

Thank you! BTW, the actual development goes on https://sr.ht/~abcdw, project mailing lists are here: https://lists.sr.ht/~abcdw, post question/ideas/patches on respective mailing list, other contributors and users will be able to participate in the discussion and provide their feedback and ideas.

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-- Best regards, Andrew Tropin

[moesasji]

I'm aware of this issue and thought about it briefly. It's not technically possible to have few home-environments, because each of them would define the same env variables, run shepherd multiple times and probably will do some other undesired things. Combining profiles is an easy task, while combining home-environments is almost impossible.

I was still thinking of this being a single home-environment, but with the ability to have the list of packages that should be in this environment split into multiple if desired. Typical usage would be to update all packages in the user home-environment, but I personally see a use-case for being able to only update a subset. For me pretty much for the same reasons as why it pays off to break up the list into separate manifests. Making this easier to manage/reason about would be on my wish-list as the learning curve is steep....

I'll shut up now and just let you get on with writing code ;)

[abcdw]

I was still thinking of this being a single home-environment, but with the ability to have the list of packages that should be in this environment split into multiple if desired. Typical usage would be to update all packages in the user home-environment, but I personally see a use-case for being able to only update a subset. For me pretty much for the same reasons as why it pays of to break up the list into separate manifests. Making this easier to manage/reason about would be on my wish-list as the learning curve is steep....

It's not technically possible to update/build/whatever only the part of home-environment, as it's not possible to update only first 3 packages out of 10 of your manifest without splitting it into two different manifests or using inferiors, but for other technical reasons I mentioned above it's not possible to have few home-environments (maybe someday it will change). Thus, the only two options for such feature are: - To use a combination of home-environment + manifests, which makes the whole setup semi-consistent, but gives you freedom to update parts independently. - To use inferiors, which is kinda cool, but still in early stages of development. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/guix.html#Inferiors I keep in mind this use case, but most likely you should rely on two options above.

I'll shut up now and just let you get on with writing code ;)

Thank you) We already implemented most of the essential parts, and hope to make it ready for a wider audience of early adopters soon, just in a few weeks.

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-- Best regards, Andrew Tropin