Hartmut Goebel transcribed 1.3K bytes:
> Am 07.09.2017 um 10:30 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> > However, I don’t quite understand the use case: you’d like to hack on
> > the OS declaration of the image from within the image?  That sounds
> > inconvenient no?
> 
> My use case is this:
> 
> I plan to use GuixSD for one of my systems. Prior to installing GuixSD
> on real hardware, I want to test it and see how a GuixSD system would
> work and feel. And taking the perspective of a non-developer, I don't
> have any GuixSD yet. I may be using Fedora or Debian and want to try out
> GuixSD. For this I use the QEMU image

You can take any system configuration file and build a shared or free-standing
vm with the "guix system" function. It's really easy this way.
"guix system vm config.scm" would produce a vm and in the end you get a
shell script you can use to start this vm.

> My understanding is that I would have a system-definition describing
> this very system and if I want to change the system-configuration, I
> change the system-definition. On e.g. Debian I would apt-get software
> and change config-files, while on GuixSD I would change the
> system-definition and reconfigure.
> 
> And I imagine to have the corresponding system-definition *in* the
> system, since in this use-case there is no separate "main GuixSD
> installation". Like when using ansible, puppet, etc. for managing *this*
> system, I need the system definition *for* this system *in* this system.
> 
> I hope this is clearer now.

Wouldn't simply keeping the configuration file(s) in a git help
(for a start)? This is what I do personally:
https://gitweb.krosos.org/systems

For infotropique I have this combination of plain config files (templates)
and (almost) the same content in variations of the before referenced "install.scm".
> -- 
> Regards
> Hartmut Goebel
> 
> | Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
> | www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |
> 
> 
> 
> 

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