Re: [Blog/Cookbook?] On multiple Guix profiles and manifests

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Chris Marusich <address@hidden> writes:

> This is true.  However, in practice, I often wind up in this sort of
> situation:
>
> 1.  I want an environment for hacking on a project for which there isn't
> a Guix package yet.  I build the environment using a manifest, and then
> I run "guix environment -m manifest.scm".  Great!
> 2.  Many weeks or months pass as I work on other things.
> 3.  I run "guix pull" at some point.
> 3.  Eventually, I want to work on that project again, so I run "guix
> environment -m manifest.scm".  But now I have to wait hours for Guix to
> build and install stuff!
>
> In this situation, if I could just "enter the environment for a
> profile", I wouldn't have to wait for Guix to recompile the world.  With
> "guix environment -m manifest.scm", you have to wait for the latest
> version of everything to be built.  I realize that you could roll back
> your Guix installation to whatever version was being used back then (do
> you even remember when it was?  I often forget...) and then "guix
> environment" ought to work (unless the outputs were GC'd in the
> meantime), but I don't think that's a very viable solution because it
> requires the user to remember what version was in use at the time and to
> take the extra steps necessary to rollback the Guix installation first.
> For that reason, I like your suggestion of using "GUIX_PROFILE=profile;
> . $GUIX_PROFILE/etc/profile" better.  It requires no waiting, and
> because it's a profile you get easy per-profile roll-back.

This is a very good point, I'll include this in the blog article as yet
another reason to use profiles instead of environments.

> There are two shells.
> ...

Thanks for the details!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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