Hello Guix, as at least some of you are hopefully aware, the way Emacs interacts with Guix packaging is unsatisfactory in a few key ways. In particular, each major version upgrade completely breaks Emacs both running and not yet running until environment variables are updated [1]. Also, there are instances of packages breaking each other by installing to common subdirectories [2].
I have opened up a new wip-emacs branch to address these issues. It consists of the patches I wrote in the past few days, that are still awaiting review. (As it is now April 1st, people who only consume the mailing lists by the archives will soon have forgotten about them otherwise). While alternative patches exist, particular the ones written up by Maxim, I believe mine to be the "correct" ones, as they only cause rebuilds to Emacs and its dependants, thereby making them applicable to staging rather than core-updates. (In the past we also had Emacs patches pushed directly to master, since Emacs packages are fairly cheap to build; I want to avoid this here until we can be certain up to some level of reasonable doubt, that they do not cause any issues in the affected packages.) I have so far tested the patches by running my own Emacs manifest in a pure environment, which has not yet led to me declaring .emacs bankruptcy. I would strongly encourage other users of Emacs, particularly those, that have large numbers of Emacs packages in their profiles, to try out the wip-emacs branch and report to me any issues with it/directly push patches to wip-emacs if they're trivial. I don't plan to keep this branch alive for too lang. In one or two weeks time, depending on activity, I will submit its frozen version to review once more. In this frozen version, I will also sign off any commits from others, that I've already reviewed myself. Regards, Leo [1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/47458 [2] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/45316