Re: Introducing ‘guix pack’

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com> skribis:

> 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.

Yes, something like that.

> 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? :)

Yes!  I thought about making at least /var/guix/db optional and
off by default.

If we remove /var/guix/profiles, users will have to actually type
/gnu/store/asasdfadfgsadfa-profile/bin/guile.  This is not great, but I
don’t know what else could be done.  We could profile a
/bin/guile → /gnu/store/asasdfadfgsadfa-profile/bin/guile symlink, but
perhaps that’s risky too.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.