Re: Guix days guix home discussion

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello!

Ryan Prior <rprior@protonmail.com> skribis:

> 1. I haven't been able to use Guix Home to migrate my home config across machines. I've done this 3 times since I started using Guix on what I would consider advanced-level (writing Guile, defining my own packages & manifests, contributing patches.) Each time, I've got frustrated with the applicability of what documentation or examples I could find, and ended up migrating the bad old way by copying config files & modifying them as needed. Guix does help me in these migrations somewhat by allowing me to install needed software environments in a non-disruptive way, but I haven't gotten any use out of Home here. For reference, my attempts have been on elementary OS and Ubuntu, never on Guix System.

If this is a documentation issue, it would be nice to pinpoint what
examples were missing or what info was unclear.

If it’s a more general applicability issue (like: “this thing is useless
to me”), then maybe that’s okay :-), or maybe we should look which or
your use cases should be addressed by Home but aren’t.

> 2. I've desired to use Guix Home on foreign distros to run Guix services (like Docker or Postgres) via Shepherd, but have failed to do so thus far. I read documentation in Guix and Shepherd, and some source code. I've got Shepherd installed & running on some of my machines, but I can't figure out how to use it to run Guix services. Possibly I'm missing something, but I also wonder whether perhaps Guix services are only intended to run on Guix System?

In general, you can only use services that are explicitly designed for
or “ported” to Guix Home, which are documented here:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Home-Services.html

(You can find them with ‘guix home search’.)

Now, there’s a mechanism in place that simplifies porting System
services to Home, though again, that work has to be done explicitly.

> I would like to help make Guix Home & services have an excellent experience on foreign distros. I intend to write documentation, blog posts and code to do so. I've been stuck, though, in actually making progress understanding how to accomplish my aims, and every time I've tried it so far I've been in enough of a hurry that I gave up after a couple days' hacking. If anybody wants to pair with me or lend a hand I'd be thrilled to get back to this.

Would be great!

Thanks,
Ludo’.