Containers on Guix

[David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

Hello all,

As some of you know, I wrote 'guix environment' as the first step on my
journey to use Guix to improve my (and hopefully others) software
development workflow.  Now that the basics are working, I'm interested
in taking things further.  In particular, I want to extend 'guix
environment' to support spawning VMs and then, hopefully, containers
(those things that the Docker folks have been talking about so much
lately).

I did some reading about how Docker creates containers and discovered
that it uses systemd-nspawn[0] to do it.  Since Guix uses dmd, using
systemd-nspawn isn't an option.  Does anyone have thoughts on how we
might have similar functionality in the Guix distro?

Would an nspawn equivalent be appropriate for dmd?  Or a completely
separate program?  This seems to be a Linux only feature, so if we added
a container creation program, would it make it harder to support the
Hurd?

I'm lost and confused!  Send help! :)

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate