nix-darwin
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LnL7
Disable taking control of ~/Applications folder MkII
This PR supercedes #226.
So far application bundles were always linked to ~/Applications or
~/Applications/Nix Apps if the former was an existing directory.
In nix-community/home-manager#1341 a conflict was found with suggested
new Home Manager behavior, where applications installed through Home
Manager would end up in ~/Applications/Home Manager Apps. This was in
an attempt to make them discoverable through Spotlight but further
investigation suggest Spotlight does not pick up symlinked apps (details
in the issue).
However, there are other programs that expect to be able to write to
~/Applications so taking over the directory is unfortunate.
PR #226 dropped linking ~/Applications and instead made sure the
directory exists so we can always link in ~/Applications/Nix Apps.
After further discussion in #macos:nixos.org we came to the conclusion
that we shouldn't link applications to a user directory at all. Since we
manage packages for multiple users, application bundles should go in
/Applications.
Because previous code will likely leave a symlink at
~/Applications/{,Nix Apps}, which will become dangling once the path
it links to is garbage collected from the store we test to see if a link
exists and it conforms to the path we're expecting and if it does remove
it.
Note: This is a draft because I haven't had time to test it.
I still haven't had time to test it. Until someone does I think this should stay a draft.
I just had a chance to check this out (after discussing with @toonn in #macos:nixos.org) and can confirm that this seems to be working as intended. /Applications/Nix Apps is created with the installed app bundle symlinked into it. ~/Applications was removed entirely.
