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doc: cookbook: Suggest ‘guix shell’ as an alternative to multiple profiles. 

Multiple profiles are relatively hard to set up and maintain, especially
for newcomers.  Thus, suggest ‘guix shell’ as an alternative.

* doc/guix-cookbook.texi (Guix Profiles in Practice): Add note
linking to ‘guix shell’.
(The benefits of manifests): Remove outdated info about ‘guix
environment’ and profiles that may be GC’d.  Update.
Ludovic Courtès 2023-10-16 14:19:59 +02:00
parent 569c085927
commit 37b0ddbcb7
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@ -3714,7 +3714,7 @@ reference.
@section Guix Profiles in Practice
Guix provides a very useful feature that may be quite foreign to newcomers:
@emph{profiles}. They are a way to group package installations together and all users
@dfn{profiles}. They are a way to group package installations together and all users
on the same system are free to use as many profiles as they want.
Whether you're a developer or not, you may find that multiple profiles bring you
@ -3722,6 +3722,16 @@ great power and flexibility. While they shift the paradigm somewhat compared to
@emph{traditional package managers}, they are very convenient to use once you've
understood how to set them up.
@quotation Note
This section is an opinionated guide on the use of multiple profiles.
It predates @command{guix shell} and its fast profile cache
(@pxref{Invoking guix shell,,, guix, GNU Guix Reference Manual}).
In many cases, you may find that using @command{guix shell} to set up
the environment you need, when you need it, is less work that
maintaining a dedicated profile. Your call!
@end quotation
If you are familiar with Python's @samp{virtualenv}, you can think of a profile as a
kind of universal @samp{virtualenv} that can hold any kind of software whatsoever, not
just Python software. Furthermore, profiles are self-sufficient: they capture
@ -4034,29 +4044,12 @@ profiles, they are not strictly equivalent: profiles have the side effect that
they ``pin'' packages in the store, which prevents them from being
garbage-collected (@pxref{Invoking guix gc,,, guix, GNU Guix Reference Manual})
and ensures that they will still be available at any point in
the future.
the future. The @command{guix shell} command also protects
recently-used profiles from garbage collection; profiles that have not
been used for a while may be garbage-collected though, along with the
packages they refer to.
Let's take an example:
@enumerate
@item
We have an environment for hacking on a project for which there isn't a Guix
package yet. We build the environment using a manifest, and then run @code{guix
environment -m manifest.scm}. So far so good.
@item
Many weeks pass and we have run a couple of @code{guix pull} in the mean time.
Maybe a dependency from our manifest has been updated; or we may have run
@code{guix gc} and some packages needed by our manifest have been
garbage-collected.
@item
Eventually, we set to work on that project again, so we run @code{guix shell
-m manifest.scm}. But now we have to wait for Guix to build and install
stuff!
@end enumerate
Ideally, we could spare the rebuild time. And indeed we can, all we need is to
To be 100% sure that a given profile will never be collected,
install the manifest to a profile and use @code{GUIX_PROFILE=/the/profile;
. "$GUIX_PROFILE"/etc/profile} as explained above: this guarantees that our
hacking environment will be available at all times.