Hi Etienne,
> I think we've arrived at the limit of how I understand the daemon to work, > and GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. I think I understand that you > are using a single node (hpc of sort I imagine), where users create sessions, > and within which you provide the guix command, having > set up GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to a unix-domain socket (to that same node / > itself). That makes total sense in the context of the single > node. Did I get that right? No, we provide Guix on *all* cluster nodes and workstations, but they all talk to a single guix-daemon, which is the sole manager of /gnu. We provide a default Guix for all those who haven’t yet run “guix pull” at /gnu/remote/bin/guix. That location is on the PATH on all machines. This script does three things: - it sets GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to http://guix-node:9999 - it removes “gc” from the arguments and prints a warning (this is not enough to prevent GC, but it works well enough) - it looks for the user’s “guix” in /home/who/.config/guix/current/bin; if it exists it execs that “guix” with the arguments; otherwise it executes the shared default Guix. > The issue with profiles you are mentioning is interesting; I haven't > quite thought it through yet. I think I would personally want users to > be able to create profiles (for reproducibility reasons) but I guess > it would work the same way with guix shells built from manifests, > maybe slightly less easy to interact with, I don't know. In my experience, profiles always end up growing in a stateful manner. People use them to satisfy old habits of installing, removing, and upgrading packages, and inevitably they run into conflicts because they install new packages to a profile built with an older version of Guix. Yes, using manifests would avoid that, but if you’re already using manifests you might as well use “guix shell -m”. For long-term reproducibility we recommend recording the current channels with “guix describe -f channels” and add the output to version control. With “guix time-machine -C channels.scm -- shell -m manifest.scm” people can restore the environment in the future. -- Ricardo Wurmus System administrator BIMSB - Scientific Bioinformatics Platform Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine email: ricardo.wur...@mdc-berlin.de tel: +49 30 9406 1796
