From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andreas Enge Subject: Re: The tricky case of "--localstatedir=/var" Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:41:09 +0100 Message-ID: <20160216164109.GA5983@solar> References: <20160216135729.GB13560@novena-choice-citizen.lan> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:44826) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aVigg-0005u5-3p for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:41:18 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aVigc-0000KR-0p for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:41:17 -0500 Received: from mailrelay2.public.one.com ([91.198.169.125]:41407) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aVigb-0000KE-Kz for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:41:13 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Ricardo Wurmus Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 03:29:02PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote: > Jookia <166291@gmail.com> writes: > > * Change localstatedir to /var by default. > > * Put the localstatedir in /gnu. > I’m actually doing this on my cluster installation. It’s very > convenient at first because you can just mount /gnu and be done with it, > but since enabling users to manage their profiles from all cluster nodes > over the network “/gnu” and “/gnu/var” have to be mounted separately and > sequentially with different flags: “/gnu” should be read-only in general > (in particular “/gnu/store”) and “/gnu/var/guix/profiles” must be > read-writeable for users to be able to install things into their > profiles. This is an interesting point; I would rather have been in favour of the second solution, assuming that it would also simplify the binary installation (everything is self-contained inside /gnu). Why do they need to be mounted separately? Could /gnu not be mounted keeping the access rights of the original file system? There is also a middle ground that would be possible: Move some of the content of localstatedir to /gnu; this would make sense for the sqlite database, for instance. Then it would be possible to copy /gnu from one system to another. On the other hand, there are quite a few more things in /var/guix, so maybe this is not really sensible. In any case, I am for implementing one of these two possibilities. Andreas