System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Pjotr Prins]

With the recent SuSE announcement I hope Guix gets taken up as a
package manager on non-native Guix systems (Debian in particular).
Something I have been doing for years with great success - deploying
some massively complex systems.

One thing I have always wanted to do is use Guix' system configuration
capabilities on top of Debian. But, so far, I have no idea how to go
about that.

Can someone help? We can make a blog out of it. Say I want to
configure Nginx as a system tool using Guix. What would be the steps
to take? A simple example would help a lot! 

And a separate question: can the shepherd run next to systemd? I would
think so. I have no real love for systemd, but it is rather hard to
avoid on recent distros.

Pj.

Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Amirouche Boubekki]

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Le dim. 19 août 2018 à 08:02, Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> a
écrit :

> With the recent SuSE announcement I hope Guix gets taken up as a
> package manager on non-native Guix systems (Debian in particular).
>

What recent SuSE annoucement are you refering to?

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Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 09:19:15PM +0200, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
>    Le dim. 19 août 2018 à 08:02, Pjotr Prins
>    <[1]pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> a écrit :
> 
>      With the recent SuSE announcement I hope Guix gets taken up as a
>      package manager on non-native Guix systems (Debian in particular).
> 
>    What recent SuSE annoucement are you refering to?

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-08/msg00066.html

I think it is rather exciting.

Pj.

Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Jonathan Brielmaier]

On 8/19/18 10:47 PM, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 09:19:15PM +0200, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
>>    Le dim. 19 août 2018 à 08:02, Pjotr Prins
>>    <[1]pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> a écrit :
>>
>>      With the recent SuSE announcement I hope Guix gets taken up as a
>>      package manager on non-native Guix systems (Debian in particular).
>>
>>    What recent SuSE annoucement are you refering to?
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-08/msg00066.html
> 
> I think it is rather exciting.
> 
> Pj.

Just to make sure guix is not supported in any way by the SUSE company
on it's SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) systems. It's just an official
openSUSE package and could be installed on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 due
to "binary compatibility" between SLE and openSUSE.

It's still exciting :)
Jonathan

Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Carlo Zancanaro]

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On Sun, Aug 19 2018, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> One thing I have always wanted to do is use Guix' system 
> configuration capabilities on top of Debian. But, so far, I have 
> no idea how to go about that.

I would also be interested in this. I have thought about it a 
little bit, but I haven't made any concrete steps towards making 
it happen.

> Can someone help? We can make a blog out of it. Say I want to 
> configure Nginx as a system tool using Guix. What would be the 
> steps to take? A simple example would help a lot!

For something like nginx it might be possible to reuse the code in 
(gnu services web) which generates a config file for nginx. This 
would be a very simplistic way of doing things, though, and 
wouldn't really solve the problem generally.

It would be cool if we could instantiate a given service graph on 
the currently running system, although working out how to do this 
without interfering with the host distribution sounds tricky. 
GuixSD assumes that it's in control of the entire system, so the 
easiest way to do this might well be start up an isolated GuixSD 
system in a container/vm. If we wanted to run on the host 
distribution we'd at least have to come up with a different set of 
base services, because %base-services would almost certainly 
conflict with the host distribution.

> And a separate question: can the shepherd run next to systemd? I 
> would think so. I have no real love for systemd, but it is 
> rather hard to avoid on recent distros.

You could start an instance of the Shepherd as a systemd service. 
I use the Shepherd to manage my user sessions, but I use systemd 
to start it when it's available. If you start it under systemd 
then you can't shutdown/restart using the Shepherd, but everything 
else should work properly.

Carlo

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Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:

> One thing I have always wanted to do is use Guix' system configuration
> capabilities on top of Debian. But, so far, I have no idea how to go
> about that.

One thing you could try, though it’s probably not as nice as what you’d
expect ;-), is to run a GuixSD container on your system.

That is, you write a GuixSD configuration with all the services you
need, and then you run ‘sudo guix system container that.scm’.

Not perfect, but it should work without additional hacking.

Ludo’.