bug#73903: [shepherd]: Guix Home's shepherd masks shutdown/reboot on foreign distribution

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Dariqq <dariqq@posteo.net> skribis:

> On 20.11.24 11:46, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> 
>>> Another (simpler solution) would be to just solve the problem in guix
>>> by using a shepherd variant that deletes sbin and share/man/man8.
>> Yes, this sounds like a reasonable solution to me.
>> Ludo’.
>
> How should this work? should this be a (public?) procedure? Should it
> rebuild shepherd or just copy the output with trivial-build-system?

My understanding of this proposal is that there would be a
“shepherd-foreign” package, which is like “shepherd” but without
‘reboot’ and ‘halt’.

That package could be implemented with ‘trivial-build-system’ or
‘copy-build-system’ indeed, and it would symlink all of ‘shepherd’,
except its ‘sbin’ directory.

> I just thought of a more elegant solution, but this would be a lot
> harder to implement properly:
>
> - Move the sbin stuff into a seperate output
> - Home shepherd service only adds the main output to the profile and
>   shepherd-root-service both
> - Will need adjustments some packages that currently reference
>   shutdown/reboot ( -> lots of rebuilds because logind) and the same
>   change for the shepherd packages in the shepherd module.

The advantage is that no extra step would be needed when using a foreign
distro.  But yeah, it’s relatively intrusive, and not my favorite
solution, FWIW.  Dunno.

WDYT?

Ludo’.