partial guix pack?

partial guix pack?

[Andy Tai]

Can a guix pack be partial?  By that I meant one package that is not
completely stand alone but only contains a subset of needed software,
bundled libraries.  for example, one that bundles specific version of
gtk+ but not glibc?  Of course such a package depends on host glibc
and may have the risk of breakage but it is likely low risk if the
main problem is it needs specific version of gtk+.

Re: partial guix pack?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Andy Tai <atai@atai.org> skribis:

> Can a guix pack be partial?  By that I meant one package that is not
> completely stand alone but only contains a subset of needed software,
> bundled libraries.  for example, one that bundles specific version of
> gtk+ but not glibc?  Of course such a package depends on host glibc
> and may have the risk of breakage but it is likely low risk if the
> main problem is it needs specific version of gtk+.

Currently there’s no way to do that.

We could implement a feature that removes certain store items from the
pack, say glibc.  But then, all the binaries in the pack have Guix’s
glibc in their RUNPATH and executables have its loader as an ELF
interpreter.  So that process would need to rewrite RUNPATHs and INTERPs
to those commonly found on FHS distros… not impossible, but a bit
tedious just to end up with binaries that may or may not work.

Ludo’.