Re: Package Installation Queries

[Niall Dooley]

On 8 February 2017 at 22:47, Carlo Zancanaro <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 08 2017, Niall Dooley wrote
>> (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. 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?
>
> I install all of my Emacs packages via Guix, but in an usual way. I have
> written a script which takes in a list of Emacs packages that I want to
> install, then uses the Elpa importer to generate a Guix package (the
> scheme data structure) which I can build using `guix package -f`. Each
> time I run the script it pulls the most recent version on Melpa, so it's
> not reproducible, but I get the ability to use Guix for roll-backs (and
> in theory I think I could archive my configuration and import it on
> another machine, but I haven't tried that).
>
> The biggest advantage to me is actually that I can look at the source of
> one of my installed Emacs packages without having to worry that I'll
> accidentally modify my installed version. This is what motivated me to
> use my current method (as ridiculous as that sounds).
>
> I have attached my script. It won't run on a normal Guix installation
> because it uses symbols from (guix import elpa) which are not exported,
> but on my machine I have exported more things from (guix import elpa) in
> order to use them in my script. I've been meaning to submit a patch for
> this, but I haven't yet done so.

Thank you, this looks very interesting.

>> (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?
>
> I had an issue where my font didn't render unicode glyphs in Emacs. I
> was using font-dejavu and I had to also install font-gnu-unifont to get
> unicode things to render.

Ok, I'll give that a try thanks.

>> (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 use Stow to manage my dotfiles and my workflow under Guix is exactly
> the same as it was in debian.

Perfect.

> I hope that helps!

It certainly does.

Niall