Re: non-root store

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi!

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:

> recently I’ve been playing with “guix pack -RR” and I’m very happy to
> see how well it works.  Now I wonder if we could use the very same
> mechanism to wrap guix-daemon and let it manage a store directory that
> is not located at /gnu/store.

Yesss!

> Surely somebody has already tried this?

I did some time ago:

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

The environment variable names changed in the meantime, I guess you’d
need to set GUIX_STATE_DIRECTORY now.

> A common complaint about Guix is that it requires root permissions to
> install, which is “scary” and may seem unnecessary on single-user
> systems.  By wrapping guix-daemon so that it uses file system
> virtualization (via user namespaces, proot, or the glibc debug hack) we
> could eliminate this obstacle.
>
> What do you think?  Am I missing something obvious?

I think it’d be great to streamline this use case.  We could even ship a
-RR tarball in the future, though we need to think about all the
implications.

One of them is that we’d probably need to include a shell in the bundle,
so that users can “enter” the file system view that includes /gnu/store.

Alternatively, we could provide a package transformation option that
“relocatable-wraps” executables, using ‘wrapped-package’ from (guix
scripts pack).

Thoughts?

Ludo’.