Re: non-root store
Hi! Ricardo Wurmus skribis: > recently I’ve been playing with “guix pack -RR” and I’m very happy to > see how well it works. Now I wonder if we could use the very same > mechanism to wrap guix-daemon and let it manage a store directory that > is not located at /gnu/store. Yesss! > Surely somebody has already tried this? I did some time ago: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-05/msg00139.html The environment variable names changed in the meantime, I guess you’d need to set GUIX_STATE_DIRECTORY now. > A common complaint about Guix is that it requires root permissions to > install, which is “scary” and may seem unnecessary on single-user > systems. By wrapping guix-daemon so that it uses file system > virtualization (via user namespaces, proot, or the glibc debug hack) we > could eliminate this obstacle. > > What do you think? Am I missing something obvious? I think it’d be great to streamline this use case. We could even ship a -RR tarball in the future, though we need to think about all the implications. One of them is that we’d probably need to include a shell in the bundle, so that users can “enter” the file system view that includes /gnu/store. Alternatively, we could provide a package transformation option that “relocatable-wraps” executables, using ‘wrapped-package’ from (guix scripts pack). Thoughts? Ludo’.
Re: non-root store
On Sun, Dec 06, 2020 at 03:57:00PM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote: > A common complaint about Guix is that it requires root permissions to > install, which is “scary” and may seem unnecessary on single-user > systems. By wrapping guix-daemon so that it uses file system > virtualization (via user namespaces, proot, or the glibc debug hack) we > could eliminate this obstacle. We have started providing Guix built Docker containers. Works for many users. But yes, a native install would be much nicer. > What do you think? Am I missing something obvious? I have run the guix-daemon with proot as a user in the past. So it should be possible with user namespaces. https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/GUIX-NO-ROOT.org#run-guix-daemon-in-proot Once you have it in proot you can install software and even build binaries on a relative path. It is just a bit too much for the average user. Pj.
non-root store
Hi Guix, recently I’ve been playing with “guix pack -RR” and I’m very happy to see how well it works. Now I wonder if we could use the very same mechanism to wrap guix-daemon and let it manage a store directory that is not located at /gnu/store. Surely somebody has already tried this? A common complaint about Guix is that it requires root permissions to install, which is “scary” and may seem unnecessary on single-user systems. By wrapping guix-daemon so that it uses file system virtualization (via user namespaces, proot, or the glibc debug hack) we could eliminate this obstacle. What do you think? Am I missing something obvious? -- Ricardo
