Hi all! $HOME/PROFILE/setup-environment contains the following lines:
case $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in *$HOME_ENVIRONMENT/profile/etc/xdg*) ;; *) export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=$HOME_ENVIRONMENT/profile/etc/xdg:$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS ;; esac There are two bugs in this code. Both bugs revolve around what happens if XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is unset, as is the case in some foreign distros. The first problem is if, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is unset, and $HOME_ENVIRONMENT/profile/etc/xdg does not exist, then the conditional resolves to "is the empty string in the empty string", so XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is prepended with $HOME_ENVIRONMENT/profile/etc/xdg, despite it not existing. I'm not sure if incuding a nonexistant path in XDG_CONFIG_DIRS should cause problems, but this scenario is not mentioned in the XDG specifications[1], so some programs are bound to crash because of this. The second problem (more important) relates to how XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is interpreted if empty vs set to a value. As per the xdg specifications[1], if XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is unset, then a value of /etc/xdg should be used. When an empty XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set by guix home, programs find a non-empty value and ignore /etc/xdg. The above problem means that when I do a guix home reconfigure on my Librem 5 running PureOS, I get a black screen as Phosh fails to start as it needs files in /etc/xdg. I can fix it by adding: XDG_CONFIG_DIRS="$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS:/etc/xdg" to my .zlogin. A similar issue can be seen with the lines regarding XDG_DATA_DIRS in $HOME/PROFILE/setup-environment. I think a good step to resovling this issue is to set empty variables to their default value first. Maybe something like the following in gnu/home/services.scm:267 ... [ -f $PROFILE_FILE ] && . $PROFILE_FILE [ -z "$XDG_DATA_DIRS"] && XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ [ -z "$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS"] && XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/etc/xdg case $XDG_DATA_DIRS in ... This addresses the second problem, but not the first. Someone may find a more elegant way to deal with both issues. -Zacchae [1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html