Re: Towards reproducibly Jupyter notebooks with Guix-Jupyter

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Ludo,

> That reminds me of an interesting issue regarding
> bitwise-reproducibility that was raised on the Reproducible Builds
> mailing list:
>
>   https://lists.reproducible-builds.org/pipermail/rb-general/2019-September/001657.html

We ran into this problem as well in the Reproducible Research MOOC. It's
hard to test equality for notebooks. But we went for solution a) because
our main goal is to teach good practices for writers of future
notebooks, rather than patch bad practices of the past with an
additional layer of build tools.

>> It would be nice in fact to adapt the ideas behind Guix-Jupyter (and
>> perhaps parts of the code) to Org-mode. Some integration with Emacs will
>> be necessary to tell Org-mode to start Python etc. from the Guix
>> environment.
>
> I’d love to see that happen!  I thought perhaps we could trick Alex Kost
> or Pierre Neidhardt to hack on that, let’s see.  :-)

I might also do it myself because I suspect it would be less work to
write the required Emacs package than to explain how to live without it.
Tutorial-driven development :-)

What would be the best way to run code in a specific environment created
for recorded channels? The obvious approach would be

   guix pull -C channels.scm -p /tmp/temp-profile
   /tmp/temp-profile/bin/guix environment –-pure -m manifest.scm –-
   python script.py
   rm -rf /tmp/temp-profile

but doing that properly involves the usual messy precautions for dealing
with temporary directories, and it's probably expensive to do the "guix
pull" repeatedly for the same channel file just because the temporary
profile gets deleted immediately.

This looks like a use case for "guix inferior", but is that already
stable enough to be talked about in public?

Konrad.