Re: Using --search-paths with multiple profiles

[hot12shots]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 5:01 PM Dmitry Alexandrov <dag@gnui.org> wrote:

> Alas, it wonʼt help much on top of foreign distribution, where they often are 
> not.

True, good point!

On Guix native systems I've discovered another problem as well: the
PATH assignment output by `--search-paths=prefix`  can mask
/run/setuid-programs by prepending other path items in front of them,
so PATH has to be fixed manually after applying this change to ensure
sudo etc. don't break.

> > The only caveat I'm aware of is that the multiple `guix` invocations aren't 
> > instantaneous, so one might not want to use this if sourcing their .profile 
> > from .bashrc or equivalent, as it would add some init time to every shell 
> > invocation.
>
> But one should never source profiles from ~/.bashrc in any case!  They are 
> supposed to sourced by login shell only.  In other words, there is ~/.profile 
> (or ~/.bash_profile) for that.

It's definitely a nonstandard usage, but I think some people do it.
More simply, though, one might want to have .bashrc just activate the
extra Guix profiles, without sourcing .profile. This would be a
workaround to avoid having to restart the login session in order to
get access to newly activated profiles in a shell environment.