On 26/06/17 12:22, Ricardo Wurmus wrote: > > Christopher Baines <[email protected]> writes: > >> Recently I had problems with the way GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH was working with >> govuk-guix [1]. Currently, I'm using a separate directory for the >> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH that contains symlinks to a subset of the Guile >> modules necessary for the packages in the repository. >> >> I think support (whether intentional or otherwise) for this approach was >> removed in [2]. > > Looks like this was removed in an attempt to improve performance over > NFS. The “scheme-files” procedure now includes a comment: > > ;; XXX: We don't recurse if we find a symlink. > > Would it not be better to fix this instead of adding support for special > syntax in GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH?
I won't comment on the general case, but in the specific case of trying
to limit the modules which Guix will scan for packages, using symlinks
seems like a unsatisfying approach to me. So, I'm more interested in
better approaches for providing packages to Guix, but specifying
subdirectories to search.
>> I've attached a rough patch that sets this up, such that you can do
>> something like:
>>
>> export GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH="/tmp/foo^bar/baz:/tmp/cats"
>>
>> Where ^ acts as the separator, and bar/baz is the subdirectory.
>
> I sympathize with the desire to work around this problem, but for some
> reason I really don’t like adding special notation to path variables.
> (“texmf.cnf” of TeX Live has a similar feature where e.g. a trailing
> “//” indicates recursion.)
I only suggested this, as it was the simplest solution that came to mind
in terms of implementation.
Other ideas include:
A second search path environment variable, e.g.
GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH_SUB_DIRECTORIES . For a GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH like
"/tmp/repo1", this could then be set to "/tmp/repo1/mod1/mod2".
Files in the module directories to either have guix only use or ignore
directories, e.g.
/tmp/
- repo1/
- services/
- .no-packages-here
- packages/
Exported values in the modules themselves to have Guix ignore the
contents, e.g.
(define-public no-packages-here #t)
Plus probably more that other people can think of?
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