Re: Better support remote deployment

[Tomas Volf <~@wolfsden.cz>]

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On 2023-11-16 16:23:00 +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:
> 
> > Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> >> How about a 'remote-user-profile'?
> >
> > 'guix package' is already the command we use to create profiles; maybe
> > it could accept a '--remote' argument to operate on a remote machine?
> > Or is this not what 'GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=ssh://your-target guix package
> > -m manifest.scm' can already accomplish? :-)
> 
> Doing that confuses ‘guix package’ because it’d try to perform the
> effectful part (switching symlinks) locally, even though everything was
> built on another machine.  (It’s also slow due to RPC round trips, as
> Efraim wrote.)
> 
> But yeah, I think we could do something along these lines by isolating
> the effectful bits and evaluating them remotely when needed, like we did
> to achieve code sharing between ‘guix deploy’ and ‘guix system
> reconfigure’.
> 
> That said, I wonder if this would really be more convenient than SSH’ing
> into the target machine and running the commands right there.  Perhaps
> I’m missing something about the use case?

I was following the debate, but maybe I have missed something, so I will put
forward my use case as well.  I have two properties I would like to have from a
"remote deploy" mechanism, and they are not satisfied by SSH-ing to the machine
and running the commands there.

1. No need for `guix pull'.  I run (a little) custom Guix, so running `guix
pull' is somewhat expensive.  I do not want to do it just to deploy something
(be it a system, or home, or profile).

2. No need to copy over the definitions.  My configurations are part of a git
repository, which I would like to keep local to just my development machine.  So
rsync-ing it over to the remote machine in order to run command there is
something I would like to avoid.

If, however, I can build a profile locally, `guix copy' it over, and *then* SSH
into the machine and somehow activate the profile (be it home or regular
profile), that would work for me.  Is that currently possible?

> 
> Ludo’.
>

Thanks,
Tomas

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

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