Re: System-wide config

["Etienne B. Roesch" <etienne.roesch@gmail.com>]

Hi!

Thanks!

I just realised I missed the cafe guix from 2w ago about specifically that
topic (https://hpc.guix.info/events/2022/café-guix/), will the slides be
made available at some point? Who was giving the talk?

Etienne

On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 10:28 PM Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>
wrote:

> Hi Etienne,
>
> On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 5:38 AM Etienne B. Roesch
> <etienne.roesch@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I am working my way through our IT department to convince them to
> provide guix as a
> > service to our researchers.
>
> Congratulations! You should find some like-minded folks here.
>
> > Specifically, we provide vms as a service and we also have a shared
> slurm resource.
> > One question I haven’t managed to answer fully is about system-wide
> configurations.
> > We currently use puppet to pull configs on the fly and various scripts
> to turn on or off
> > services.
>
> I use neither puppet, slurm or a lot of VMs and am therefore not a
> good person to address your questions. I hope someone else steps up to
> help you out.
>
> > What is the recommended way to do this with guix system?
>
> I am not sure it's possible to combine Guix System with such a setup.
>
> > Does guix system play nicely with packages installed outside of guix?
>
> Guix System will tolerate static third-party binaries that rely solely
> on system calls. Providing prerequisites to scripts or dynamically
> linked third-party software, however, may be a challenge.
>
> Most Guix packaging replaces paths to prerequisites by absolute paths
> into our store. It happens when packages are built. There are ways to
> fake a standard Linux file system hierarchy, but I have not used it.
>
> > The alternative of simply using guix on a host debian is appealing, of
> course.
>
> I would start with that.
>
> You will lose out on some benefits in the beginning, but the goodwill
> you will swiftly earn with your IT department may allow you to switch
> to Guix System later. Guix System is an IT administrator's dream. Just
> make sure they see the "roll-back" features at some point.
>
> Please have a good week also, and thank you for promoting Guix!
>
> Kind regards
> Felix
>