From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>
Subject: Re: Running IceCat in a container
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 03:19:38 +0100
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To: Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?= <ludo@gnu.org>
Cc: help-guix@gnu.org


Ludovic Court=C3=A8s <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Actually there are really two approaches we could use.  One is to create
> wrappers like this one that do the right thing, independently of what
> the user=E2=80=99s profile contains (=E2=80=98guix package=E2=80=99 could=
 even generate wrappers
> automatically in some cases.)
>
> The second approach is a =E2=80=98guix run/environment=E2=80=99 kind of c=
ommand that
> generates the environment at run time.
>
> There are pros and cons to both, I think.

This is just a tangent:

I=E2=80=99ve been thinking that =E2=80=9Cguix run=E2=80=9D (or an extension=
 of =E2=80=9Cguix container=E2=80=9D)
would be great not only for running applications in containers that are
*already* in the store, but also to run applications from tarballs that
were generated with "guix pack=E2=80=9C.

    pack=3D$(guix pack $(readlink -f $HOME/.guix-profile) -S /bin=3Dbin)
    guix run --image=3D${pack} /bin/icecat

Look, we=E2=80=99ve got our own container image format! :) This seems to co=
ver
85% of all uses of Docker/Singularity in the field of bioinformatics.

~~~

The setup to create configuration files and set environment variables so
that the target application feels at home in the container =E2=80=94 that a=
ll
looks an awful lot like profile hooks to me.  Maybe we can have a set of
common hooks that we can automatically derive from package inputs?

--
Ricardo

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