bug: getconf PATH does not return home manager profiles

[ibizaman]

Are you following the right branch?

• [X] My Nixpkgs and Home Manager versions are in sync

Is there an existing issue for this?

• [X] I have searched the existing issues

Issue description

Emacs remote editing relies on running getconf PATH on the remote machine to know where to find binaries. This is what that command returns:

$ getconf PATH

/run/current-system/sw/bin:/bin:/usr/bin

Which is far from including everything that's on the path:

$ echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'

/run/wrappers/bin
/home/ibizaman/.nix-profile/bin
/nix/profile/bin
/home/ibizaman/.local/state/nix/profile/bin
/etc/profiles/per-user/ibizaman/bin
/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin
/run/current-system/sw/bin

This issue relates to the paths pertaining to home-manager. Emacs can't find those binaries out of the box.

I found this related issue from a while ago https://releases.nixos.org/nix-dev/2013-June/011250.html which provides a workaround https://releases.nixos.org/nix-dev/2013-June/011251.html. Following that thread, there was a PR merged in a while ago which hardcodes paths in glibc https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/586/files.

I'm not sure how we can even make this configurable if it's currently hardcoded in glibc but I at least wanted to raise this issue for awareness. Feel free to close this as "won't do" if there's no easy way to handle this. I added a section to the Emacs wiki about this https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Emacs

Maintainer CC

No response

System information

- system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 6.1.67, NixOS, 24.05 (Uakari), 24.05.20240408.4cba8b5`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `relaxed`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.2`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

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[dmvianna]

Please reopen, this makes NixOS unusable with Emacs.

[dmvianna]

Possible solution: https://releases.nixos.org/nix-dev/2013-June/011251.html