Re: How to install guix without root permission

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

rohit yadav <rohityadav@utexas.edu> skribis:

> I am using guix for sometime now and I must admit, it is very clean
> compared to nix. However, I want to install it on system where I do not
> have root permission. Is is possible? If so, how?

It is possible, but currently inconvenient and brittle, as noted at the
bottom of:

  https://gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Build-Environment-Setup.html

The problems are:

  1. you’d be producing binaries for, say, /home/rohit/gnu/store instead
     of /gnu/store, so you’d have to build everything by yourself since
     the substitutes from hydra.gnu.org are for use in /gnu/store;

  2. you’d have no build isolation and long file names, which is likely
     to break builds here and there (things will use stuff from /usr/bin
     and /lib, shebangs will be longer than the kernel-imposed limit,
     etc.)

There have been discussions to improve the situation, and work in that
direction will hopefully start this year¹.  The preferred approach will
be the “user namespace” feature of the kernel Linux; does your system
support it, out of curiosity?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ See the discussion that starts at
  <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-10/msg00947.html>.