Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

Great :). I would make it a little clearer that this is
'bootstrapping' and hype it a little more that now there is no reason
NOT to install Guix. Only 100Mb on your HDD.

The warning about overwriting a Guix installation should be earlier.
Maybe point out that if you want to move a package with dependencies
see another part of the documentation.

BTW when Nix decided to go for a meta-database they lost something. I
know it has good reasons (performance mostly) but it took away the
self-containedness of packages. It would be nice just to be able to
copy/del packages and rebuild the meta information. Do we have
something like that? 

Pj.

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:31:09PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I???ve documented installation from the binary tarball (which I plan to
> distribute for the next release) in commit 09722b1.  Please let me know
> what you think.
> 
> Ludo???.
> 
> 
> 2.1 Binary Installation
> =======================
> 
> This section describes how to install Guix on an arbitrary system from a
> self-contained tarball providing binaries for Guix and for all its
> dependencies.  This is often quicker than installing from source, which
> is described in the next sections.  The only requirement is to have
> GNU tar and Xz.
> 
>    Installing goes along these lines:
> 
>   1. Download the binary tarball from
>      ???ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz???(1),
>      where SYSTEM is ???x86_64-linux??? for an ???x86_64??? machine already
>      running the kernel Linux, and so on.
> 
>   2. As ???root???, run:
> 
>           # cd /
>           # tar xf guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz
> 
>      This creates ???/gnu/store??? (*note The Store::), ???/var/guix???, and
>      ???/root/.guix-profile???.  ???/root/.guix-profile??? is a ready-to-use
>      profile for ???root??? where Guix is installed.
> 
>   3. Setup the daemon as explained below (*note Setting Up the
>      Daemon::), and run it:
> 
>           # /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon --build-users-group=guix-builder
> 
>   4. Make the ???guix??? command available to other users on the machine,
>      for instance with:
> 
>           # mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
>           # cd /usr/local/bin
>           # ln -s /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix
> 
>    And that???s it!
> 
>    There are two things to note.  First, don???t unpack the tarball on a
> working Guix system since that would overwrite its own essential files.
> Second, the ???guix??? package must remain available in ???root??????s profile, or
> it would become subject to garbage collection???in which case you would
> find yourself badly handicapped by the lack of the ???guix??? command.
> 
>    The tarball in question can be (re)produced simply by running the
> following command in the Guix source tree:
> 
>      make guix-binary.SYSTEM.tar.xz
> 
>    ---------- Footnotes ----------
> 
>    (1) As usual, make sure to download the associated ???.sig??? file and to
> verify the authenticity of the tarball against it!
> 

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