Hi Evan!
On Tue, Dec 22 2020, Evan Straw wrote:
... When I add a package (like stumpwm) that needs to set
XDG_DATA_DIRS, the problem seems to reappear. ...
I think I've had this problem in the past. I'm currently running
on a foreign distribution, and I have this in my ~/.profile file:
# XDG_DATA_DIRS often starts off empty, but an empty value is
# interpreted as this value. Loading a profile can set it,
though,
# which effectively ignores the default value. We want it to
# instead add to the default, so we set it here to the default
# value.
if [ -z "$XDG_DATA_DIRS" ]; then
export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/"
fi
I think I took the default value from
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html
where it says:
If $XDG_DATA_DIRS is either not set or empty, a value equal to
/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ should be used.
I hope that helps!
Is this a bug, or is it possible I've just misconfigured
something?
We should consider this a bug, because Guix's attempt to add to
the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable clobbers the default value
that foreign distributions are relying on.
We should at least document this in the manual, maybe in "(guix)
Application Setup".
Carlo
