HPC: switch to shared Guix from “guix pull”

HPC: switch to shared Guix from “guix pull”

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi,

in the HPC setup at the MDC, we have a shared Guix installation, which
provides the daemon and a reasonably recent “guix” command, which should
be enough to let people run “guix pull”.  This Guix installation is
really just a configured and built git checkout, and the “guix-daemon”
is started with “./pre-inst-env guix-daemon” in a suitable environment.

This is ugly, so I’d like to switch to “guix pull”, which provides both
the daemon and the “guix” command.

For historical reasons, Guix here is configured with
localstatedir=/gnu/var instead of just /var.  “guix pull”, however,
provides a Guix that is configured with “localstatedir=/var”.

How can I override this?

--
Ricardo

Re: HPC: switch to shared Guix from “guix pull”

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> skribis:

> For historical reasons, Guix here is configured with
> localstatedir=/gnu/var instead of just /var.  “guix pull”, however,
> provides a Guix that is configured with “localstatedir=/var”.

With ‘guix pull’, you’ll get a (guix config) that respects your current
settings (see ‘%config-variables’ in (guix self)).  However, it’s true
that ‘guix pull’ will give you ‘guix-daemon’ with hard-coded settings,
in particular localstatedir=/var.

Perhaps what we could do is replace ‘guix-daemon’ in (gnu packages
package-management) with a procedure that takes those config variables
as parameters and passes them as #:configure-flags.  That way, the
daemon that ‘guix pull’ provides would honor your current settings.

Alternately, you could create some bind-mounts or symlinks?  :-)

HTH,
Ludo’.