Re: Package Installation Queries

[Alex Kost]

Niall Dooley (2017-02-08 17:24 +0100) wrote:

> Firstly, I'm an aspiring programmer/hacker and I've gone straight
> into the deep end with trying to learn GNU/Linux, Emacs etc. I'm also
> new to Guix and this community so excuse my ignorance. 

Hello and welcome!

> I've installed Guix as a package manager on the Trisquel 7
> distribution of GNU/Linux running on a (Minifree) Libreboot X60s. I
> believe it was successful. Hoping to transition to GuixSD at some
> point and would be grateful to hear if others have had success with
> this. Anyway,...
>
> I proceeded to install Emacs, Geiser, Magit (subsequently removed),
> the Source Code Pro (SCP) font, GNU Stow, Git for now and for which I
> have a number of perhaps trivial queries. A limited search on the
> list archives turned up nothing so forgive me if these queries have
> been covered elsewhere.

No problem, this mailing list was created for such questions.

> (1) When I installed magit, v2.8.0 was installed instead of the
> v2.10.1 listed on hydra. Is this a bug or an error on my part? 

You probably didn't run "guix pull", so you installed the old magit (and
you will continue to install the old packages until you run "guix pull").

> (2) In terms of Emacs, do fellow Guix users install all packages via
> Guix instead of the traditional ELPA, MELPA route. I suspect they do
> as I guess that is the point.

Well, I don't, because currently Guix does not have all the emacs
packages I use (but it's my fault that I didn't package them :-)), so I
use some packages from Guix and some from… other places.

> But I ask for advice as my 'pre-guix'
> emacs config makes heavy use of the use-package macro installing all
> third party packages to ~/.emacs.d/elpa . I guess I could add the
> 'guix-emacs' site-lisp directory for each guix installed package to
> the load-path specifying this in each specific use-package package
> declaration. Is that what others do?

No, if you use Emacs from Guix ("guix package -i emacs"), you will not
have to add all those site-lisp directories as Guix's Emacs is patched
to find and autoload the packages there automatically.

I think use-package is completely unrelated to this question.  It's not
"use-package" that installs into "~/.emacs.d/elpa", it's an in-built
Emacs package system (aka "package.el"), "use-package" does not perform
any installation by itself.  You can still use Emacs from Guix and use
"use-package" from MELPA if that's your concern.  You don't need to
adjust your emacs config for Guix at all.

> (3) Before installing Guix I used SCP as my font for Emacs. However,
> following the installation of SCP via Guix some unicode glyphs are
> not rendered correctly as they were before. Note, I did a fresh
> install of my foreign distro before installing Guix and did not
> re-install SCP on it. Is there further steps I need to perform to
> have these unicode glyphs rendered correctly?

What unicode symbols are not displayed correctly for you?  If I
understood correctly, SCP is a font and you installed it with Guix,
right?  What name does this (SCP) package have in Guix?

> (4) I wish to manage my dotfiles with GNU stow. Traditionally, I
> understand people create a dotfiles directory say under $HOME and
> create the various subdirectories in this directory from which the
> symlinks are produced. Is this approach still the same with GNU stow
> installed via Guix or is the 'stow' directory created elsewhere?

I know nothing about 'stow', but it should behave the same as on any
other system.

-- 
Alex