Oops, my bad, I seemed to have hit Reply, instead of Reply-all.

Here is the follow up to that email:

Etienne B. Roesch <etienne.roesch@gmail.com> 3:42 PM (12 minutes ago) to Pierre-Antoine

Merci Pierre-Antoine ! :)

It sounds like you also made the conscious choice of using guix shells, instead of profiles. Why is that? I am guessing profiles have a more widespread impact on what's available to the user, modifying paths and so on, whereas shells would be more contained and short-lived, and therefore "safer" for users?

I'll have to write documentation and train users either way ;)

Etienne

Pierre-Antoine Bouttier 3:47 PM (7 minutes ago) to me

> Merci Pierre-Antoine ! :)

My pleasure :)

> It sounds like you also made the conscious choice of using guix shells, instead of profiles.

> Why is that?

Because

> I am guessing profiles have a more widespread impact on what's available to the user,

> modifying paths and so on, whereas shells would be more contained and short-lived, and

> therefore "safer" for users?

;)

Yes, indeed, the isolated and self-contained aspect of guix shell avoid to mess with environment variables. And it’s far more easier, in a reproducibility point of view, with manifest.scm and channels.scm to explain to users how to work with guix time-machine and guix shell.

But, our users can use guix profile (and some of them don’t hold back).

P-A

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 3:33 PM Pierre-Antoine Bouttier <Pierre-Antoine.Bouttier@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr> wrote:

Hi Etienne,

The issue with profiles you are mentioning is interesting; I haven't quite
thought it through yet. I think I would personally want users to be able to
create profiles (for reproducibility reasons) but I guess it would work the
same way with guix shells built from manifests, maybe slightly less easy to
interact with, I don't know.

As part of the support team in a HPC center that provides guix command to our users to set up their software environments, we advice them to use guix shell rather than guix profile and most of them are pretty happy with that.
Obviously, you need to write a good documentation :)

My 2 cents
P-A

---
Pierre-Antoine Bouttier
CNRS Research Engineer
Dir. Adj. UAR GRICAD

GriCAD - https://gricad.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/
Batiment IMAG
CS 40700
38058 Grenoble CEDEX 9

+33 4 57 42 18 66

Le 14 déc. 2023 à 16:28, Etienne B. Roesch <etienne.roesch@gmail.com> a écrit :

Thanks a ton!

I think we've arrived at the limit of how I understand the daemon to work,
and GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. I think I understand that you are using a single
node (hpc of sort I imagine), where users create sessions, and within which
you provide the guix command, having set up GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to a
unix-domain socket (to that same node / itself). That makes total sense in
the context of the single node. Did I get that right?

I think what we are aiming for, in our case (where users each have their
own nodes as it were, only sharing network drives), is providing the guix
command on each node, set up with GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET connecting with ssh to
a master node with a daemon, that itself would have access to the same
network drives.

Etienne

On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 2:48 PM Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>
wrote:

"Etienne B. Roesch" <etienne.roesch@gmail.com> writes:

Hiccups: we provide home dirs as nfs drives through the network. Using
guix, we are thinking of creating one nfs drive, shared by all
users, to contain /var/guix and /gnu/store, symlinked from /.
As I understand, that should work, until a user decides to run "guix gc"
(which would clear wrongly assumed unused profiles) or maybe
until a user decides to launch several vms (which is theoretically
possible, but doesn't happen often).

I would strongly discourage the use of profiles in users’ home
directories. When introducing Guix we now only demo “guix shell”, which
is preferrable in most cases. “guix gc” is problematic when profile
links are in locations that the daemon cannot read.

Efraim suggested using a shared daemon ssh-ing GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. We
would probably run this on a separate vm. We are however unsure how it
would behave when /var/guix/daemon-socket/socket is itself on an nfs.

We only export /var/guix/profiles, not anything else in /var/guix.
Using GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET with a network port (make “guix-daemon” listen
on that port) is all we ever needed.

--
Ricardo Wurmus

System administrator
BIMSB - Scientific Bioinformatics Platform
Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine

email: ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de
tel: +49 30 9406 1796