Guix home and operating-system

Guix home and operating-system

[Tissevert]

Hi Guix,

I'm finally having some time to try and put guix on the older machines at home
and thought I'd start by generating a live CD to show the rest of the family
what that would look like without having to make any irreversible changes yet.

Meanwhile, as this is a time to clean and rationalize system declarations to
ease maintaining the various machines, I thought it would be an appropriate
time to try and start learning about guix home (I came to guix for the
reproducibility, I'm not going to spend hours on each machine reproducing the
same user config !).

To my greatest astonishment, I found no way to make guix home configurations
interact with operating-system declarations. I expected something along the
lines of a "configuration" or "home" field in the user-account data type, which
could contain directly a valid guix home configuration or maybe the path to a
file containing one. At least, I expected to find a "packages" field to allow
specifying the packages set for a particular user. This is of course necessary
when building a read-only live image which won't be able to receive
modification at a later time. More generally, this raised a question in me: why
go to such length to have a whole declarative system which you can generate in
advance on each aspect, and then require to launch (stateful !) command lines
at a later time to alter the configuration of users.

I was discussing that the other night with @unmatched-paren on IRC and was told
this could be an interesting idea so what do you think ? Is there a good reason
why this hasn't been implemented ? Would it be very complicated to run the
equivalent of a guix home at the end of the system generation ? I'd be
personally interested to work on such a feature but I have absolutely no idea
where to start and would be glad to receive some pointers if it was deemed
useful enough that I should spend my time on it.

Now I can think of several ways to do that differently: I suppose the live CD
could have a system service performing the call to guix home to setup the
user's environment during the boot. Also, this would not cover user services
but regarding file configurations, I can think of a way because I'm prone to
config vertigo these days: there are so many levels where we can alter the
config, why always delay it ? Packages often contain a default configuration,
and upon start the program checks half a dozen places for a custom user config:
in other words why have a bash profile in my home when I could generate a bash
package which has directly my dream profile in its "default" version in /etc ?
I could still use ~/.bash_profile for a temporary tweak. Is that something
people in guix do frequently ? Why ?

Cheers,

Tissevert

Re: Guix home and operating-system

[Andrew Tropin]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3604 bytes --]

On 2022-07-06 11:20, Tissevert wrote:

> Hi Guix,
>
> I'm finally having some time to try and put guix on the older machines at home
> and thought I'd start by generating a live CD to show the rest of the family
> what that would look like without having to make any irreversible changes yet.
>
> Meanwhile, as this is a time to clean and rationalize system declarations to
> ease maintaining the various machines, I thought it would be an appropriate
> time to try and start learning about guix home (I came to guix for the
> reproducibility, I'm not going to spend hours on each machine reproducing the
> same user config !).
>
> To my greatest astonishment, I found no way to make guix home configurations
> interact with operating-system declarations. I expected something along the
> lines of a "configuration" or "home" field in the user-account data type, which
> could contain directly a valid guix home configuration or maybe the path to a
> file containing one. At least, I expected to find a "packages" field to allow
> specifying the packages set for a particular user. This is of course necessary
> when building a read-only live image which won't be able to receive
> modification at a later time. More generally, this raised a question in me: why
> go to such length to have a whole declarative system which you can generate in
> advance on each aspect, and then require to launch (stateful !) command lines
> at a later time to alter the configuration of users.
>
> I was discussing that the other night with @unmatched-paren on IRC and was told
> this could be an interesting idea so what do you think ? Is there a good reason
> why this hasn't been implemented ? Would it be very complicated to run the
> equivalent of a guix home at the end of the system generation ? I'd be
> personally interested to work on such a feature but I have absolutely no idea
> where to start and would be glad to receive some pointers if it was deemed
> useful enough that I should spend my time on it.
>
> Now I can think of several ways to do that differently: I suppose the live CD
> could have a system service performing the call to guix home to setup the
> user's environment during the boot. Also, this would not cover user services
> but regarding file configurations, I can think of a way because I'm prone to
> config vertigo these days: there are so many levels where we can alter the
> config, why always delay it ? Packages often contain a default configuration,
> and upon start the program checks half a dozen places for a custom user config:
> in other words why have a bash profile in my home when I could generate a bash
> package which has directly my dream profile in its "default" version in /etc ?
> I could still use ~/.bash_profile for a temporary tweak. Is that something
> people in guix do frequently ? Why ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tissevert
>

Hi Alice!

This topic was discussed a few times already, but still not yet
implemented.  Probably the last one was "Guix system with
home-environment" in help-guix mailing list.

I played around with it, did some changes to Guix Home (maybe some small
patches not yet upstreamed, but they are not critical IIRC), but didn't
finish the implementation and postpone it again, still think it's really
valuable feature.

I don't remember all the details and where I stopped, but the highlevel
idea is following:

- Define a system services, which contains (user . home-environment) pairs.
- Build home environments on system reconfigure.
- Activate home environments on boot.

Here are some WIP half an year old code for guix-home-service-type:

[-- Attachment #1.2: home.scm --]
[-- Type: application/octet-stream, Size: 2075 bytes --]

(define-module (gnu services home)
  #:use-module (gnu services)
  #:use-module (gnu services shepherd)

  #:use-module (guix gexp)
  #:use-module (guix packages)
  #:use-module (guix records)

  #:export (guix-home-service-type))

(define (guix-home-activation-gexp config)
  #~(begin
      (map
       (lambda (x y)
         (let* ((user (getpw x))
                (uid (passwd:uid user))
                (gid (passwd:gid user))
                (dir (passwd:dir user)))
           (format #t "Running activation script for ~a,\n the path is ~a." x y)

           (mkdir-p dir)
           (chown dir uid gid)

           (setuid uid)
           (setenv "HOME" dir)
           ;; TODO: maybe not needed?
           ;; (setgid gid)
           (system y)))
       '#$(map car config)
       '#$(map (lambda (x) (file-append (cdr x) "/activate")) config))))

(define (guix-home-shepherd-service config)
  (map
   (lambda (x)
     (let ((user (car x))
           (he (cdr x)))
       (shepherd-service
        (documentation "Activate Guix Home.")
        (requirement '(user-homes))
        (provision (list (symbol-append 'guix-home- (string->symbol user))))
        (one-shot? #t)
        (auto-start? #f)
        (start #~(make-forkexec-constructor
                  '(#$(file-append he "/activate"))
                  #:user #$user
                  #:environment-variables
                  (list (string-append "HOME=" (passwd:dir (getpw #$user))))
                  #:group "users"))
        (stop #~(make-kill-destructor)))))
     config))

(define (guix-home-gc-roots config)
  (map cdr config))

(define guix-home-service-type
  (service-type
   (name 'guix-home)
   (description "Setups home-environments specified in the value.")
   (extensions (list (service-extension
                      shepherd-root-service-type
                      guix-home-shepherd-service)
                     (service-extension
                      gc-root-service-type
                      guix-home-gc-roots)))
   ;; (compose append)
   ;; (extend append)
   (default-value '())))

[-- Attachment #1.3: Type: text/plain, Size: 37 bytes --]


-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 832 bytes --]

Re: Guix home and operating-system

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:

> I don't remember all the details and where I stopped, but the highlevel
> idea is following:
>
> - Define a system services, which contains (user . home-environment) pairs.
> - Build home environments on system reconfigure.
> - Activate home environments on boot.

That would be a nice addition!

Ludo’.

Re: Guix home and operating-system

[Andrew Tropin]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 583 bytes --]

On 2022-07-18 11:38, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:
>
>> I don't remember all the details and where I stopped, but the highlevel
>> idea is following:
>>
>> - Define a system services, which contains (user . home-environment) pairs.
>> - Build home environments on system reconfigure.
>> - Activate home environments on boot.
>
> That would be a nice addition!

For future readers, the work is happenning in #56669
(Message-ID: 63960cf762aec1ed2c4182f49cac66bc37fce2aa.camel@rdmp.org)

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 832 bytes --]

Re: Guix home and operating-system

[bokr]

Hi Andrew,

On +2022-07-27 11:34:14 +0300, Andrew Tropin wrote:
> On 2022-07-18 11:38, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:
> >
> >> I don't remember all the details and where I stopped, but the highlevel
> >> idea is following:
> >>
> >> - Define a system services, which contains (user . home-environment) pairs.
> >> - Build home environments on system reconfigure.
> >> - Activate home environments on boot.
> >
> > That would be a nice addition!
> 
> For future readers, the work is happenning in #56669
> (Message-ID: 63960cf762aec1ed2c4182f49cac66bc37fce2aa.camel@rdmp.org)
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Andrew Tropin

I'm guessing you have handy emacs macros or other means to turn that
message ID and/or bug number to a browsable URL, but for others it
will save them time if you post a clickable URL also :)

How much is missed by those who don't participate in IRC?
I wonder how one would make a history book section to include
all the "the work is happening" venues :)

IMO zimoun sets a great example referencing resources, along with ludo,
(not to leave out people whose posts are fine with one or two URLs :)

I use this to browse a bug by  number:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
#!/usr/bin/bash
# browse-bug

num="$(echo "$1"|tr -cs '0123456789' ' '|tr -d ' ')"

my_browser="${MY_BUG_BROWSER:-lynx}"
if [ -n "$num" ];then
    $my_browser "https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=$num"
else
    echo "\
Usage: [MY_BUG_BROWSER=<your preference>] browse-bug BUG_NUMBER (not '$1' -> '$num')
    BUG_NUMBER will be taken from \$1 word stripped of non-digits if any
    If you set MY_BUG_BROWSER to firefox-esr, you can run this in the background like
        browse-bug '#56669' & 
    but lynx will want interaction from you on stdin, so no '&'
    NB: if you Ctl-V the #, delete it or quote it, or bash will throw it away as comment.
"
    exit 1
fi
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
HTH :)
--
Regards,
Bengt Richter

Re: Guix home and operating-system

[david larsson]

> I use this to browse a bug by number:
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> #!/usr/bin/bash
> # browse-bug
> 
> num="$(echo "$1"|tr -cs '0123456789' ' '|tr -d ' ')"
> 
> my_browser="${MY_BUG_BROWSER:-lynx}"
> if [ -n "$num" ];then
>     $my_browser "https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=$num"
> else
>     echo "\
> Usage: [MY_BUG_BROWSER=<your preference>] browse-bug BUG_NUMBER (not
> '$1' -> '$num')
>     BUG_NUMBER will be taken from \$1 word stripped of non-digits if 
> any
>     If you set MY_BUG_BROWSER to firefox-esr, you can run this in the
> background like
>         browse-bug '#56669' &
>     but lynx will want interaction from you on stdin, so no '&'
>     NB: if you Ctl-V the #, delete it or quote it, or bash will throw
> it away as comment.
> "
>     exit 1
> fi
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Useful idea, thanks!