Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

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

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 12:08:39PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> You could rebuild the database only if the contents of the /gnu/store
> directory were authoritative (which they are not).  The database only
> contains four tables and none of the entries are magical:

That is good.

> Someone daring enough to mess with the store contents (by manually
> adding, altering or removing stuff) without going through the daemon
> would also have to take care of manipulating database records in the
> appropriate manner.  I fail to see, however, in what situation this
> would be desirable to a system administrator.
> 
> Sysadmins don't expect, for example, to be able to delete files from a
> system where software is managed with RPM *without* also having to
> modify the RPM database to avoid problems.

You are wrong here. Not wanting to start disputing minor points, but
people do clean out directories and install new software in existing
distributions. Guix gets away from the latter, but not from the first.

> If I were to sync /gnu/store/ across different machines with rsync, I'd
> make sure to keep any additional state by also copying the
> localstatedir: /var/guix/.  But as I said before, I fail to see a good
> reason to do this.

That is a problem. Anyone else see what I mean, at all?

> > It may also allow for people creating other store-based tools in time.
> 
> Guix can be used as a library and with the store monad it is possible to
> programmatically manipulate the store.  I expect this to become even
> easier once the daemon is rewritten in Scheme (which is bound to result
> in more reusable parts that could be glued together by adventurous
> sysadmins).

Sounds good :)

Pj.