Questions regarding "Relocatable" option

Questions regarding "Relocatable" option

[YOANN P]

Hi Guix,

First, thanks for making my day when i read some days ago the post about "Relocatable", what a great news and a killer feature ! Far better than my trick exposed past weeks ago to Ludovic and even better than the wrapper i had imagine to write :)
When "proot" will be included in the binary tarball and implemented with "relocatable", it will be awesome ! 

Some questions coming from this new feature that i don't already tested :

- Could we hope to see it included in the next release ?

- Could we hope to see it included by default in the binary tar.gz of this next release to be able to use guix directly in an unprivileged environment ? ( i dreaming of this every night ^^ )

- Does the "relocatable" could be the default option and have an "--no-relocatable" option for people who want to avoid the little extra time to start an application ?

- While a i write those questions, i just wondering, after compiling Guix with  "relocatable", does it mean we could packaging Guix itself with the "relocatable" option, be able to use it in an unpriviliged environment , and by the way, having the answer to my second question ^^ ? :)

Best regards, Guix it is really a good project

Re: Questions regarding "Relocatable" option

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Yoann,

YOANN P <yoann_mac_donald@hotmail.com> skribis:

> - Could we hope to see it included in the next release ?

It’s definitely gonna be there.  :-)  Guix is mostly rolling release, in fact.

> - Could we hope to see it included by default in the binary tar.gz of this next release to be able to use guix directly in an unprivileged environment ? ( i dreaming of this every night ^^ )

I experimented with it a bit a reported my findings here:

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

In short it’s still inconvenient, so it won’t happen for this release.

To address the main limitation, I thought we could have a
“--relocatable” package transformation option as well¹ that people could
use to automatically wrap what they install.  Food for thought…

¹ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html

> - Does the "relocatable" could be the default option and have an "--no-relocatable" option for people who want to avoid the little extra time to start an application ?

We already discussed this a while back, I think.  :-) I think the
default should remain unchanged given the extra overhead (in space and
build time, not just startup time of the resulting binaries) that
wrappers introduce, and given that user namespaces are missing on many
systems still.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

RE: Questions regarding "Relocatable" option

[YOANN P]

Hi ludo,

>I experimented with it a bit a reported my findings here:
>
>  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-05/msg00139.html
>
>In short it’s still inconvenient, so it won’t happen for this release.
>
>To address the main limitation, I thought we could have a
>“--relocatable” package transformation option as well¹ that people could
>use to automatically wrap what they install.  Food for thought…
>
>¹ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html

Sounds great even if it is inconvenient for now :) sadly, not see many replies to your test :/

>We already discussed this a while back, I think.  :-) I think the
>default should remain unchanged given the extra overhead (in space and
>build time, not just startup time of the resulting binaries) that
>wrappers introduce, and given that user namespaces are missing on many
>systems still.

indeed, wasn't aware it was you though ^^ but I don't think we talked about space and build time overhead when we had this discussion.
Namespace will be activate everywhere with (a lot of) time and eventually with the introduction of proot as fallback wrapper :p
So, the best option (only from my point of view), it will be to have 2 binary build downloadable : 
- normal
- relocatable
So every users ( rootless or not ) could use guix as an environnement/packages manager with the overhead involved depending on the binary downloaded.
With having the choice of the build, the user could choose overhead or not depending the env he's on, and could deploy his "manifest" he had previously put in scm ( oh yeahhhh ) to deploy his environment.

Thanks for all of your hard work on this project Ludo

Best regards,
Yoann

De : Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>
Envoyé : mercredi 20 juin 2018 21:32
À : YOANN P
Cc : guix-devel@gnu.org
Objet : Re: Questions regarding "Relocatable" option
 
Hello Yoann,

YOANN P <yoann_mac_donald@hotmail.com> skribis:

> - Could we hope to see it included in the next release ?

It’s definitely gonna be there.  :-)  Guix is mostly rolling release, in fact.

> - Could we hope to see it included by default in the binary tar.gz of this next release to be able to use guix directly in an unprivileged environment ? ( i dreaming of this every night ^^ )

I experimented with it a bit a reported my findings here:

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

In short it’s still inconvenient, so it won’t happen for this release.

To address the main limitation, I thought we could have a
“--relocatable” package transformation option as well¹ that people could
use to automatically wrap what they install.  Food for thought…

¹ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html

> - Does the "relocatable" could be the default option and have an "--no-relocatable" option for people who want to avoid the little extra time to start an application ?

We already discussed this a while back, I think.  :-) I think the
default should remain unchanged given the extra overhead (in space and
build time, not just startup time of the resulting binaries) that
wrappers introduce, and given that user namespaces are missing on many
systems still.

Thanks,
Ludo’.