On November 22, 2020, Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> wrote:

Because the question is what to do if you invoke

guix pack -f docker guix postgresql
[snip]
So I would suggest that

guix system docker-image ...

create /etc/passwd by merging the required user accounts like described
above, but

guix pack -f docker a b c

really can't do that.

This makes sense to me. If you pack just some packages, you get the binaries/libs/whatever but no supporting structure. If you pack a service or a system, you get the supporting structure to make it able to run.
Then it's a matter of documenting this appropriately and making it discoverable. For example, something I want to do is set up an action in my CI that runs a Postgres db and a Rails service, then kicks off some tests. So how do I figure out what Guix command to run so that I can get Postgres and Rails into a Docker image, not just as bare minimal binaries but as services that I can actually run?