Guix + User Namespaces wrapper (UGuix)

Guix + User Namespaces wrapper (UGuix)

[Roman Inflianskas]

Hello,

I'm writing a wrapper for Guix + User Namespaces called UGuix. The goal is
to implement a tool that would be easy to use and that would provide users
a possibility to install Guix, and then Guix packages without having a
root. It's inspired by https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot but
aims to be more user-friendly and high-level.

It already works like this:
```
$ ug bootstrap
... # Downloads the binary distribution of Guix, unpacks it to
`~/.guix/root`, does unshare + chroot to the dir with `/gnu` mounted along
with all `/` contents, auths substitutes, downloads latest packages,
installs `hello`
Hello, world!
$ ug run hello  # Runs `hello` installed to `~/.guix/root/gnu`
Hello, world!
$ ug guix install mc
... # Installs mc
```

It works but I want to want to do proper testing before I publish my work.
The question is: is it OK to run the tests which run bootstrap with
downloading packages from substitutes over and over again? Also, I want to
make it so that GitHub Actions will start the tests on new PRs.

-- 
Regards, Roman Inflianskas

Re: Guix + User Namespaces wrapper (UGuix)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Hi Roman,

This looks amazing!

If I recall correctly, some contributors were discussing this feature
some time ago on the mailing list.  (Was it with Ludo?)

Maybe this could provide further insights.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Guix + User Namespaces wrapper (UGuix)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> If I recall correctly, some contributors were discussing this feature
> some time ago on the mailing list.  (Was it with Ludo?)

It should already be possible to use “guix pack guix” (with a few extra
options) to generate a relocatable Guix with a daemon that can run as an
oblivious root inside the execution container.

The only missing bits then are to let the Guix command line tool talk to
the wrapped daemon, but perhaps that also works by setting the daemon
socket environment variable.

-- 
Ricardo