Re: Running IceCat in a container

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Actually there are really two approaches we could use.  One is to create
> wrappers like this one that do the right thing, independently of what
> the user’s profile contains (‘guix package’ could even generate wrappers
> automatically in some cases.)
>
> The second approach is a ‘guix run/environment’ kind of command that
> generates the environment at run time.
>
> There are pros and cons to both, I think.

This is just a tangent:

I’ve been thinking that “guix run” (or an extension of “guix container”)
would be great not only for running applications in containers that are
*already* in the store, but also to run applications from tarballs that
were generated with "guix pack“.

    pack=$(guix pack $(readlink -f $HOME/.guix-profile) -S /bin=bin)
    guix run --image=${pack} /bin/icecat

Look, we’ve got our own container image format! :) This seems to cover
85% of all uses of Docker/Singularity in the field of bioinformatics.

~~~

The setup to create configuration files and set environment variables so
that the target application feels at home in the container — that all
looks an awful lot like profile hooks to me.  Maybe we can have a set of
common hooks that we can automatically derive from package inputs?

--
Ricardo

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