Don't modify dotfiles in $HOME without asking in the installer

[hdgarrood]

I noticed that the installer modifies ~/.profile without asking, which (IMO) is not good etiquette. For example, I prefer to keep my dotfiles under version control, and I've now added a bit of code to my dotfiles that adds Nix to the path when I want that to be the case. But now, whenever I install Nix on a new system, or even if I reinstall it on my current system, the installer will add the redundant extra line anyway.

In general I think that it's best to have people make any necessary changes to ~/.profile manually, because then they're more aware of what has actually happened, and so it's less likely that the system will behave in a surprising way because of modifications to these dotfiles, and also it's more likely that they will be able to fix it if it does start behaving in a surprising way.

Would you consider changing this behaviour so that it instead just prints the line that you need to add to .profile and lets you do it yourself?

[puffnfresh]

Reinstalling shouldn't add an extra line, the installer does a check to make sure the line isn't present before adding it.

[hdgarrood]

I guess the installer didn't notice in my case because I changed it to use $HOME rather than the full path to my home directory (I want my dotfiles to work across machines regardless of my username).

[hdgarrood]

See also #555 (although I'm suggesting Nix basically do the exact opposite of what that suggests).

[issmirnov]

+1.

I would strongly appreciate a message at the end of the installation that explains where the various files live. I had to dig around on several issues before I learned about all the relevant details. Here's my suggested text to append to the install script, after Try it! Open a new terminal, and type and before Thank you for using this installer. If you have any feedback, don't hesitate. See https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/scripts/install-multi-user.sh#L255.

Important Information:
- Nix is installed to $NIX_ROOT
- Your user profile is at $HOME/.nix-profile
- The installer has updated $PROFILE_TARGETS with a call to load the nix daemon.
- If you are getting command not found errors, make sure that your '$PATH' contains $HOME/.nix-profile/bin

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info