Hi! Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> 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’.
