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From: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>
To: Ethan Blanton <elb@kb8ojh.net>
Cc: 56076@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#56076: guix shell -P behavior is surprising with persistent home
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 23:10:21 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87letlu5s2.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Yq5GmheRwHRPgJgD@colt.lan> (Ethan Blanton's message of "Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:41:46 -0400")

Hi Ethan,

Ethan Blanton <elb@kb8ojh.net> skribis:

> I am using guix shell to create an isolated container, but using a
> persistent home directory to preserve configuration and state for the
> program in the container.  Specifically, I am using (lightly
> simplified; note that the user is elb and the manifest contains ONLY
> syncthing):
>
> CONTAINER_HOME=/path/to/persistent/home
> MANIFEST=/path/to/manifest.scm
>
> guix shell --container --network --no-cwd -P      \
>            --share=$CONTAINER_HOME=/home/elb --   \
>            /bin/sh -c 'SSL_CERT_DIR="$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/ssl/certs" syncthing'
>
> Because syncthing requires a certificate store, the easiest way to
> configure that seemed to be through the profile /etc dir, which meant
> using -P.  The above command works, and works correctly, but only the
> first time the profile is started.

I guess it’s confusing because ‘-P’ and ‘--share’ kind of step on each
other’s toes: they both want to control /home/elb.

> On subsequent starts, guix complains that:
>
> guix shell: error: cannot link profile: '/home/elb/.guix-profile' already exists within container
>
> This is easily worked around by removing .guix-profile from the
> --share-bound home directory before invoking guix shell.
>
> It is not clear to me that this is a bug, but it was surprising.  It
> was also surprising that there was not an obvious way to simply
> declare a persistent home directory for a container, although now that
> I understand the `guix shell` command better, I find this less
> surprising than I did when I was first exploring.

Yeah, I’m not sure how to better handle that; the two options are
conflicting.

That said, for this particular use case, you could do:

  guix shell syncthing nss-certs openssl -- syncthing

Adding ‘openssl’ to the mix is a trick to ensure that SSL_CERT_DIR is
defined, thanks to the search path mechanism:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Search-Paths.html

Thoughts?

Ludo’.




  reply	other threads:[~2022-06-24 21:11 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-06-18 21:41 bug#56076: guix shell -P behavior is surprising with persistent home Ethan Blanton via Bug reports for GNU Guix
2022-06-24 21:10 ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]
2022-06-24 21:18   ` Maxime Devos
2022-06-27  7:55     ` Ludovic Courtès
2022-06-27  8:37       ` Maxime Devos
2022-06-28  7:43         ` Ludovic Courtès
2022-06-28 10:50           ` Maxime Devos
2022-06-28 12:08           ` Maxime Devos

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