Re: Providing a Guix System images catalog.

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> skribis:

> Mathieu Othacehe writes:
>
> Hello Mathieu,
>
>> To build a Guix System image, one needs to pick an operating system file
>> and call "guix system disk-image my-os.scm" to get an image.
>>
>> While this works fine on desktop, this is more tricky for the embedded
>> devices. Which operating system to select in "examples" folder? What's
>> the difference between --system and --target, which one should I use?
>>
>> This attached, wip patch, allows to run (on wip-hurd-vm branch):
>>
>> guix system image hurd-disk-image
>>
>> instead of:
>>
>> guix system disk-image --target=i586-pc-gnu  gnu/system/examples/bare-hurd.tmpl
>
> That's pretty nice!

+1!

> I wonder about how this composes; if I'd want to add say a guix-daemon
> service to the bare-hurd, how would I do that?

How about leaving the ‘operating-system’ field of <image> to #f or some
default value, and then filling it in with the argument passed to ‘guix
system’?

Or better: at the API level, we’d look for an “image constructor” (or
“image type”), not an image, where an image constructor is a procedure
that takes an <operating-system> and returns an <image>.  In practice,
you’d wrap that in <image-type> with a ‘name’ field so you can still
look them up by name.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.