cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/34279957
guix shell sees to it that all of the dependencies (listed in the inputs and native-inputs sections) are available within the shell session it creates by downloading (or building, if necessary) the entire dependency tree.
Should you want/need more isolation from the host system, guix shell has you covered. The --pure flag will clear out most existing environments variables, such as $PATH, so that the resulting environment does not contain pointers to places like /usr. For more Docker-like isolation, the --container flag can be used, which will run the new shell session within a set of Linux namespaces so that the host system is inaccessible.
Other great resource is guix shell: Overview by Andrew.
Although, one thing I’m still trying to understand is the difference between
guix.scmandmanifest.scm… The posted article only mentionsguix.scm, but Andrew talks about both. But… he doesn’t really go into why there are two files and when you would use one or the other…