Re: rootless Guix

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> skribis:

> it would be nice if we could simplify the case where a user does not
> have root access, but the system supports user namespaces.
>
> Currently, a user would have to perform a number of non-obvious steps to
> somehow run the Guix daemon in an environment where the filesystem is
> virtualized.  It would be great if we could better support this case,
> maybe even simplify it to a point where the user does not have to even
> start the daemon by themselves.

For the record, here’s what needs to be done to run guix-daemon and guix
as produced by ‘guix pack --relocatable guix’:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-05/msg00139.html

We could certainly arrange so that users don’t have to fiddle with
$NIX_STATE_DIR etc.

> A user operating in this mode would lose the ability to share with other
> users on the same system, of course.  By default Guix could store
> everything in a subdirectory of ~/.local and map that to /gnu/store in
> the container context.  Applications would also need to be run from
> within that container context to ensure that /gnu/store file names are
> resolved properly.

Right, I’m not sure what to do with binaries installed with this
relocatable Guix: either we let the user run them from a relocatable
shell that maps /gnu/store appropriately (as in the message above),
which works but is inconvenient, or we somehow instruct ‘guix package’
to make everything relocatable before adding it to the profile (like
what ‘guix pack -R’ does.)

As for spawning guix-daemon automatically, I’m not sure.  I’d rather
have the ‘guile-daemon’ branch ready and merged, and then use that as a
library, rather than having to spawn a full guix-daemon process behind
the scenes.  Though of course, that’s a longer-term effort.

> I think this would be especially useful for situations where “guix pack”
> is not sufficient.  “guix pack” produces one-shot bundles, but it cannot
> be composed.  A daemon+store-in-container setup would be extensible.
>
> What do you think about this?  Can we automate the setup necessary for
> this scenario and add better defaults?

I think it takes some reasonable effort, it would be nice, but I’m not
entirely sure if it’s worth the effort (maybe it is, I really don’t
know.)

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.