Re: [WIP Patch] Adding an FHS container to guix shell

[John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com>]

Hi Dominic,

------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, July 12th, 2022 at 10:11 PM, Dominic Martinez wrote:

>
>
>
> John Kehayias john.kehayias@protonmail.com writes:
>
> > What about other uses for this container, like providing an isolated environment
> > to build and run software we can't do fully with bootstrap and sources (like
> > JS)? Could this become some stop-gap to allow people to work with these
> > ecosystems in a more controlled way within Guix? Or an alternative build
> > environment? Not entirely sure what this could mean, just thinking out loud.
>
>
> I think an interesting idea would be to allow packages to transparently
> run in the FHS container (i.e. a shim that turns 'x' into 'guix shell
> --fhs-container x -- x'). That way software incompatible with GuixSD in
> a way too difficult to patch could be still be packaged and used
> transparently, albeit with a significant performance cost.
>
> Even if packages in Guix proper don't use it, it could be useful for
> third-party channels or end-users to whip up packages.
>

Yes, this is something I was thinking of, as a partial stop-gap for when you need to use software that can't be fully packaged the way we want for Guix. Not sure what the details would look like exactly (internally), but could be a useful tool to have.

> Thanks so much for this; I've been thinking about getting around to this
> feature for quite a while.

You are welcome and thanks for the kind words! I've also been thinking about this for a while, and luckily a lot of this was laid out in what others have done (and myself for non-free packaging).

I'm already using a variation of this to do some development work that otherwise wouldn't be possible without maybe a VM or using another machine.

John