Re: Guix home, guix system, channels, some noob questions

[Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq]

Thanks Julien, Daniel, Dominic, Efraim for these very detailed answers and snippets, that will be very useful in my current migration from Ubuntu to Guix.

Best regards,

Le 26/05/2022 à 02:31, Dominic Martinez a écrit :

I answer here if i need some highlights or if i found interesting questions or remarks to share with you.

Sébastien Rey-Coyrehourcq <sebastien.rey-coyrehou...@univ-rouen.fr> writes:

The only things holding me back at the moment is two things :

a) doom emacs flavour, how to manage the fact that doom use straigt.el
to maintain packages

I don't think it's possible to use Doom with Guix emacs packages, but you can just set up Doom as you would on another distro. I did this while I transitioned to a Guix config, using ~home-files-service-type~ to deploy my Doom config files.

b) "password / secrets" management ?

There are two things, file to directly encrypt (like ssh key) and
password to hide into configuration file (templating)

b.1) So, that need to encrypt/decrypt more or less "on-the-fly" the

files using gpg/yubikey or age like yadm ( https://yadm.io/docs/encryption ) or chezmoi

(https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/encryption/gpg/) do ?

I use small wrappers around GPG's built in encryption (https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L2663) and decryption (https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L2691) functions to manage secrets directly in my repository on the fly. Then I can have supported services call the script to get secrets without storing them in plain-text (https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L1648).

b.2) And for templating, like replacing ${mypassword} into some

configuration file by getting info stored into password manager like "pass", i also don't know how to do that.

Org makes this really convienent. Using noweb and shell scripts I can decrypt and insert secrets into templated areas when I tangle my configuration files. That way my repo only contains encrypted secrets, but as long as I have my GPG keys I can build my configuration files locally. See https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L5 and https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L1937.

c) synchronization of my .dotfiles between two different OS/System :
Ubuntu (home) / Guix (work & home)

I keep all my configuration in a git repository, then use ~guix home~ to put all the files in the right places. As others have noted, there are many ways to identify the current system and do system-specific operations. I personally use an environment variable to keep track, and wrap guix operations with scripts that detect the system and use different system/home configurations (https://git.sr.ht/~dominicm/dotfiles/tree/main/item/System.org#L2366). Then all I have to do is supply the script with the system name on the first run, and ~home-environment-variables-service-type~ takes it from there.

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