‘guix’ commands can talk to remote daemons

[ludovic.courtes@inria.fr (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Guix!

With what I committed today, it is possible to make ‘guix’ commands talk
to remote daemons, either using the raw protocol (unencrypted,
unauthenticated) or over SSH:

  GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=guix://guix.example.org:1234 guix build foo

  GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=ssh://alice@guix.example.org guix gc

It’s pretty fun but there’s a couple of caveats:

  1. It’s slow.  This is because the protocol with the daemon currently
     incurs a lot of round trips.  We should probably redesign some of
     the RPCs to be more efficient and pipelinable.

  2. (guix derivations) may try to access .drv files in the local store
     when it should really be accessing files from the remote store.
     The store abstraction on the client side may have to be extended to
     address this.

That’s it.

Feedback welcome!

Ludo’.