Re: [Non-root Guix]: Unable to build guix

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

rohit yadav <rohityadav@utexas.edu> writes:

>> Do you want to build everything from source on your system or do you
>> prefer to use binaries from the Guix project’s build farms?  Do you have
>> access to user namespaces / can you use “unshare” for file system
>> shenanigans?
>>
> I need to build guix for non-root location because at several places its
> hard to convince to use such system. However, I need several packages which
> are not usually available or outdated. The guix projects allows me to do
> so. To accomplish that I need truly non-root permission oriented method to
> bootstrap and install whatever I deem necessary for my use case.

I see.  Unfortunately you will end up having to compile everything from
source, C library, GCC,… — all of it.  When using a different store
location it is impossible to use pre-built binaries, unfortunately.

>> …you would need to take care of providing the appropriate Guile
>> environment all by yourself whereas “guix pull” does all of this for
>> you.  This error tells you that guile-gcrypt is not available in the
>> environment in which the daemon runs.
>>
>
> This is the place where I am struggling. I am not sure what more do I need
> to do then described in pjotrp notes. I could not find anything specific in
> the guix documentation as well to accomplish this.

There are two ways I can think of: the first is to use the slow
proot-style Guix to run “guix environment guix”; from within that
environment you will have all you need to build Guix.  You can use that
to compile Guix with a different store prefix and later use *that* Guix
to run “guix environment guix”.  Eventually, you could drop the
proot-style Guix.

I’m not sure it’s worth doing.  It seems like a lot of work and you will
never be able to benefit from pre-built binaries :-/

The other way is to manually build “guile-gcrypt”, using your system
compiler toolchain.  The sources are available here:
https://notabug.org/cwebber/guile-gcrypt

…

I just thought of another way: how about running the Guix daemon in a
virtual machine (you can download a ready-made VM image from the project
website) and telling Guix to talk to the VM over the network?  Running
the installed software unfortunately would have to go through the VM,
but this might be another option depending on your circumstances.

--
Ricardo