Re: Introducing ‘guix pack’

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

On Fri 10 Mar 2017 22:50, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> I had it on my to-do list and Andy said he’d like to have something like
> that to publish Guile 2.2 binaries: the ‘guix pack’ command below is a
> generalization of the code that builds the Guix binary tarball¹.  It
> creates a bundle of the closure of the given packages, with a profile
> containing all the packages.

Very cool, thank you!!!

> Andy, does this correspond to what you have in mind?

Yes, though I hadn't thought everything out.  I guess my mail question
is about user experience -- this is going to be a gateway for people to
get Guix and Guile and we should make sure there are no rough edges.  I
guess in particular I have a concern about users overwriting their
/var/guix.  (No worries about overwriting /gnu/store of course.)

Particularly if a user installs one "guix pack" then installs another
"guix pack", what happens?  Does the /var/guix tarball include the
sqlite db?  Could it be overwritten?  What if the user had already
installed Guix already; does this silently trash their Guix install?

A bug report: I just tried it but it seems guix pack doesn't respect
--no-build-hook for some reason, and also for some reason on this
machine my Guix daemon fails with "offload: command not found", which I
was getting around via --no-build-hook.

I guess what would be ideal would be:

  cd /
  sudo tar xvf aasdfafasdfjasdaldfhasdfh-guile.tar.xz

and then telling the user to run via
/gnu/store/asasdfadfgsadfa-profile/bin/guile.  That way there is very
little risk of trashing the user's system.

Of course we could also provide them a README of sorts for all the load
paths, but in the end this is a gateway to the real experience :)

I guess for binary installs you would of course want /var/guix, the
database, and the profiles.  I think in that case it makes sense to add
an option to --pack about including them, and have it default to off
(given the potential to trample a user's store).

WDYT?  Any of this make sense? :)

Andy