Re: Chrooting into GuixSD

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Nils Gillmann <ng0@n0.is> writes:

> Thorsten Wilms transcribed 1.2K bytes:
>> On 13.06.2018 10:13, Nils Gillmann wrote:
>> > > > Is this ability to chroot into GuixSD worth mentioning in the manual?
>> > > IMHO it is not worth to be mentioned in the manual, as it is the same as
>> > > for all Linux systems.
>> > Not really, since you can not*fully*  chroot a GuixSD. Some functions
>> > will not work, like interacting with the daemon or what it was. Last
>> > time I tried this was at least 1.5 years ago.
>>
>> You can interact with the daemon:
>>
>>   cd /path/to/guix/root
>>   sudo mount --bind /dev dev
>>   sudo mount --bind /proc proc
>>   sudo mount --bind /sys sys
>>   sudo unshare -m sudo chroot . /run/current-system/profile/bin/bash
>>   source /etc/profile
>>
>>   guix-daemon --build-users-group=guixbuild &
>>
>> If you then `su` to a plain user, do `source /etc/profile` again.
>>
>> I think all of `guix pull`. `reconfigure` and `package` search, install and
>> update worked here with that approach. `guix download` failed due to nss
>> certificates, until I added:
>>   export SSL_CERT_DIR="$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/ssl/certs"
>>   export
>> SSL_CERT_FILE="$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt"
>>   export GIT_SSL_CAINFO="$SSL_CERT_FILE"
>
> Huh. Okay, cool. Thanks for documeting this at least on the mailing list :)

Would any of you like to document this in the manual?

I see that the manual does not mention the rescue REPL, bournish, or
anything really about how to recover from failure.  I think it would be
good to have a sub-section in the manual under section “6 GNU
Distribution”, after “System Configuration” maybe?

The section could first mention recovery by booting into a previous
generation of the system in GRUB, explain the use of the rescue REPL,
and finally introduce how to recover the system with chroot by booting
from the installer disk image.

What do you think?

--
Ricardo