Re: Running guix-daemon as an unprivileged user (Was: [PATCH] syscalls: setns: Skip binding if there is no such C function.)

["Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" <gnu@clacke.user.lysator.liu.se>]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Eric Bavier
<ericbavier@openmailbox.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Aug 2015 14:45:28 +0200
> Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) <gnu@clacke.user.lysator.liu.se> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)
>> <gnu@clacke.user.lysator.liu.se> wrote:
>> > [Reposting with correct sender. Sorry, David.]
>> >
>> > Great! I ran into this when trying to compile and run guix on a
>> > machine at work, where I'm not root.
>> >
>> > I was planning to run guix as a stow of steroids. But I'm still
>> > wondering whether what I'm attempting is even intended to be
>> > possible? Of course, I would lose the benefits of user separation,
>> > chroot, hydra (because I can't write to /gnu) etc, but is guix even
>> > made to be able to downgrade to this situation?
>>
>> Answering myself: It is there in the Fine Manual. So it's intended to
>> work. I will try this and see how far I come.
>>
>> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Build-Environment-Setup
>>
>> "If you are installing Guix as an unprivileged user, it is still
>> possible to run guix-daemon provided you pass --disable-chroot."
>>
>
> I have experimented with this a bit lately.  It works to some extent,
> but I have had to apply a few patches to some package recipes.  Some
> packages have failing tests (where presumably they would pass or be
> skipped in the chroot), which I have disabled for the time being just
> to move along.
>
> I can post a few of the patches to the ML later.

I'm doing this from git now, as opposed to doing it from the tarball
earlier, because I want that setns patch.

I have compiled gettext, m4, autoconf, automake and guile and its
deps, installed in /home/myuser/.local.

Rather than run ./bootstrap, I've had to run gettextize, aclocal,
autoreconf -vi (no -f!) with CPATH, LIBRARY_PATH and maybe AC_MACRODIR
(probably not necessary), and I managed to get a ./configure, but it
now tells me:

./configure: line 6782: syntax error near unexpected token `GUILE,'
./configure: line 6782: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GUILE, guile-2.0 >= 2.0.7)'

guile.m4 is there in my .../aclocal/guile.m4. I had to run aclocal
manually, because otherwise it would say something about
PKG_CHECK_MODULES being undefined.


Seems like this little endeavor is hitting a lot of special cases.