Re: Defining shepherd user services -- feedback desired

[Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com>]

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ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

>> (define (services->package services)
>>   "Yield a package for SERVICES by making them into a shepherd
>> configuration file via scheme-file."
>
> This makes me think that perhaps we should generalize profile, and allow
> non-package objects in there—it doesn’t feel right to define a <package>
> for something that’s conceptually not a package at all.
>
> But then that leads to issues, like what should ‘guix package -u’ do?
> How should ~/.guix-profile/manifest represent these non-package things?
> Should we add ‘guix package --install-service’ or similar?  (Well, that
> may be overboard…)

Profiles are our mechanism for "activating" simple software like GNU
Hello.  Software that does not need to be started, stopped, or otherwise
managed by a system like Shepherd.

What is a good mechanism for "activating" more complex software that
needs this sort of management?  Perhaps we can make a "guix service"
command which performs upgrades like we do in
'upgrade-shepherd-services' (from guix/scripts/system.scm), but arranges
to execute those commands against a user-specific Shepherd, not the root
user's Shepherd?  Perhaps a user profile should also have a "user
services activation script", like how an operating system declaration
has operating-system-activation-script (in gnu/system.scm)?

I personally wouldn't mind if this stuff (e.g., the service activation
script) wound up in a user's profile, but I can see what you're saying
about how it might make using manifests difficult.  So, I also wouldn't
mind if the user service activation stuff was stored somewhere else, for
example in ~/.guix-services".  Maybe we could we stash the activation
script into a place like ~/.guix-profile/boot, similar to how we store
an activation script for the entire system in /run/current-system/boot?
There must be a way to do this that makes sense...

-- 
Chris

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