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Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/guix.texi | 36 |
1 files changed, 29 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/doc/guix.texi b/doc/guix.texi index 68ee451efc..4ee4fe1ffe 100644 --- a/doc/guix.texi +++ b/doc/guix.texi @@ -933,24 +933,24 @@ daemons on the same machine. @node Application Setup @section Application Setup -When using Guix on top of GNU/Linux distribution other than GuixSD, a -few additional steps are needed to get everything in place. Here are -some of them. +When using Guix on top of GNU/Linux distribution other than GuixSD---a +so-called @dfn{foreign distro}---a few additional steps are needed to +get everything in place. Here are some of them. @subsection Locales @anchor{locales-and-locpath} @cindex locales, when not on GuixSD @vindex LOCPATH +@vindex GUIX_LOCPATH Packages installed @i{via} Guix will not use the host system's locale data. Instead, you must first install one of the locale packages -available with Guix and then define the @code{LOCPATH} environment -variable (@pxref{Locale Names, @code{LOCPATH},, libc, The GNU C Library -Reference Manual}): +available with Guix and then define the @code{GUIX_LOCPATH} environment +variable: @example $ guix package -i glibc-locales -$ export LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale +$ export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale @end example Note that the @code{glibc-locales} package contains data for all the @@ -958,6 +958,28 @@ locales supported by the GNU@tie{}libc and weighs in at around 110@tie{}MiB. Alternately, the @code{glibc-utf8-locales} is smaller but limited to a few UTF-8 locales. +The @code{GUIX_LOCPATH} variable plays a role similar to @code{LOCPATH} +(@pxref{Locale Names, @code{LOCPATH},, libc, The GNU C Library Reference +Manual}). There are two important differences though: + +@enumerate +@item +@code{GUIX_LOCPATH} is honored only by Guix's libc, and not by the libc +provided by foreign distros. Thus, using @code{GUIX_LOCPATH} allows you +to make sure the the foreign distro's programs will not end up loading +incompatible locale data. + +@item +libc suffixes each entry of @code{GUIX_LOCPATH} with @code{/X.Y}, where +@code{X.Y} is the libc version---e.g., @code{2.22}. This means that, +should your Guix profile contain a mixture of programs linked against +different libc version, each libc version will only try to load locale +data in the right format. +@end enumerate + +This is important because the locale data format used by different libc +versions may be incompatible. + @subsection X11 Fonts The majority of graphical applications use Fontconfig to locate and |