From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ricardo Wurmus Subject: Re: Installing and Maintaining Packages on a Drive Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:40:33 +0200 Message-ID: <87y30h6mke.fsf@elephly.net> References: <1a18db26-bee5-c7d5-93cf-9444282d8bb5@posteo.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:34971) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.86_2) (envelope-from ) id 1hs4xF-0004Jd-63 for help-guix@gnu.org; Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:40:42 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1hs4xE-0007S7-5h for help-guix@gnu.org; Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:40:41 -0400 Received: from sender-of-o51.zoho.com ([135.84.80.216]:21221) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1hs4xD-0007R4-1r for help-guix@gnu.org; Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:40:40 -0400 In-reply-to: <1a18db26-bee5-c7d5-93cf-9444282d8bb5@posteo.net> List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-guix-bounces+gcggh-help-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Help-Guix" To: help-guix@gnu.org Hi Ricardo, Ricardo here. > I would like to be able to install software to a drive that I can > mount and simply add the directory to my path to use the packages. In > the event that I need to update them I would like to be able to use > the stand-alone guix to manipulate the packages, can guix solve my > problem? Guix installs all packages to /gnu/store. It keeps track of the contents of /gnu/store with a database that=E2=80=99s located at /var/guix = by default. If /gnu/store and /var/guix (or any other location you pick) are on the removable drive then you can indeed just attach and remove the drive as you please. You can even keep Guix itself (via =E2=80=9Cguix pull=E2=80=9D= ) on that same drive and use it to manipulate your profiles wherever you take the drive. What might be a little annoying is that you would need to mount or map the drive to /gnu, which is a location that generally can only be used or modified by the root user. Another problem you might have to punt on is managing profiles on machines that don=E2=80=99t have Guix installed. Guix requires the use of a daemon, and the existence of unprivileged build user accounts. You cannot build anything (not even new profile generations) without a group of unprivileged build users. So, taking your software with you is easy, but managing your profile(s) on machines that don=E2=80=99t have Guix installed and where you don=E2=80= =99t have root access would be harder. -- Ricardo