Updating guix for root

Updating guix for root

[Konrad Hinsen]

Hi Guixers,

I wonder what the correct way is to update Guix for the root user.
I did "guix pull" and got the new Guix under /root/.config/guix/current.
This also contains the daemon under
/root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon. So far, fine.

However, the systemd service still launches the daemon from 
/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon. So if I
uninstall the package "guix" for the root account (see
https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-guix@gnu.org/msg09793.html), I will
probably remove the guix-daemon that is used on system startup.

Should I

 1) update /etc/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service
    to point to the current daemon? If so, is
    /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon
    the right (stable) path to use?

 2) Get an updated guix-daemon.service from somewhere?
    If so, from where?

 3) Do nothing, and keep using the old guix-daemon?

 4) Do yet something else?

Konrad.

Re: Updating guix for root

[Clément Lassieur]

Hi Konrad,

Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> writes:

> Hi Guixers,
>
> I wonder what the correct way is to update Guix for the root user.
> I did "guix pull" and got the new Guix under /root/.config/guix/current.
> This also contains the daemon under
> /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon. So far, fine.
>
> However, the systemd service still launches the daemon from 
> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon. So if I
> uninstall the package "guix" for the root account (see
> https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-guix@gnu.org/msg09793.html), I will
> probably remove the guix-daemon that is used on system startup.
>
> Should I
>
>  1) update /etc/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service
>     to point to the current daemon? If so, is
>     /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon
>     the right (stable) path to use?
>
>  2) Get an updated guix-daemon.service from somewhere?
>     If so, from where?
>
>  3) Do nothing, and keep using the old guix-daemon?
>
>  4) Do yet something else?
>
> Konrad.

If you are the only user on your computer, you probably don't need Guix
to be installed at all for the 'root' user, and can just make sure
/etc/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service points to
/home/user/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon.  It will be updated
when you will 'guix pull' as a normal user, to the last guix package,
and hopefully, later, to the guix that was pulled.

Clément

Re: Updating guix for root

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Konrad,

> However, the systemd service still launches the daemon from 
> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon. So if I
> uninstall the package "guix" for the root account (see
> https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-guix@gnu.org/msg09793.html), I will
> probably remove the guix-daemon that is used on system startup.

You are right that this is a problem.  Our instructions for the binary
installation method say that this binary method works because it comes
with a pre-populated profile for the root user.

I believe we should revise these instructions, so that they take into
account the new behaviour of “guix pull”.

What do others think?

-- 
Ricardo

Re: Updating guix for root

[Konrad Hinsen]

Hi Clément and Ricardo,

Thanks for your replies!

I conclude from them that there is no clear recommendation yet for
dealing with this situation, so for the meantime I applied

>>  1) update /etc/systemd/system/guix-daemon.service
>>     to point to the current daemon? If so, is
>>     /root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix-daemon
>>     the right (stable) path to use?

I prefer to point to /root rather then to my $HOME which is less
reliable for reasons completely unrelated to Guix (it's on a zfs volume
shared with macOS).

So far (i.e. for about a day) this seems to work fine!

Thanks again,
  Konrad.]

Re: Updating guix for root

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:

>> However, the systemd service still launches the daemon from 
>> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon. So if I
>> uninstall the package "guix" for the root account (see
>> https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-guix@gnu.org/msg09793.html), I will
>> probably remove the guix-daemon that is used on system startup.
>
> You are right that this is a problem.  Our instructions for the binary
> installation method say that this binary method works because it comes
> with a pre-populated profile for the root user.
>
> I believe we should revise these instructions, so that they take into
> account the new behaviour of “guix pull”.

Perhaps we could somehow provide a profile that would have to be linked
to ~/.config/guix/current?

The ~root/.guix-profile that comes with the binary tarball has the
advantage of providing ‘glibc-utf8-locales’ and the corresponding
‘GUIX_LOCPATH’.  It would be nice to keep it somehow.

That requires some thought…

Thanks,
Ludo’.