Re: Using a shared Guix store (was RE: [Bio-packaging] testing out guix)

[Pjotr Prins]

Great Malcolm,

One thing I was advocating today (compared to, for example, easybuild,
modules or homebrew) is that once you create a GNU Guix package it
will live on *all* future Linux systems (and perhaps beyond). It being
a GNU project I can only imagine it becoming ubiquous.

Pj.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 07:49:53PM +0000, Cook, Malcolm wrote:
> > Cook, Malcolm <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > > Also, you discussed need for setting NIX_STATE_DIR.  This should not
> > > be needed if guix was already installed with configuration of
> > > --localstatedir=/guix/var (with /guix being nfs mounted), right?
> > 
> > NIX_STATE_DIR is used to override localstate at runtime.  If you are happy
> > with the localstatedir (defined at configure time) you do not need
> > NIX_STATE_DIR.  After my vacation I’ll take some time to think about how to
> > allow users to run “guix” on cluster nodes to manipulate their profiles — 
> > and
> > how to reliably set this all up.  I’m planning on documenting this, both in 
> > a
> > specialised form for my blog and in a more generic fashion for the Guix
> > manual.
> 
> Great - thanks for clarifying - I am looking forward to reading about this 
> further in both places.  
> 
> I will eventually care about the cluster use case, but for now my first aim 
> is to ensure that users at my institute can expect an identical experience in 
> using guix regardless of which of our multiple shared-used computational 
> servers they are logged into.
> 
> > 
> > > Ricardo also wrote "For ‘guix package’ to work,
> > > /gnu/var/guix/profiles/per-user must be shared read-write (over NFS)
> > > with correct UID mapping." - I really don't understand this and tried
> > > to elicit feedback in
> > > http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00216.html
> > > - Can anyone give me clarification on this.  I though the guix daemon
> > > is going to manage these profiles.
> > 
> > I don’t remember writing this or the context in which I wrote this (could 
> > it be
> > that Ludovic wrote this?) — looking at the code for guix/scripts/package.scm
> > it seems that the client performs some of the symlink switching when
> > switching generations (e.g. after installing a new package).  For that to 
> > work it
> > would need write permission to the user’s profile directory.
> 
> Ricardo I am sorry, you are correct, I was quoting Ludovic in a thread where 
> you replied https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2015-07/msg00042.html 
> 
> > (I could be completely wrong here.  That’s not how it’s set up here and I
> > haven’t yet tested a configuration like this.)
> 
> I hope to chime in further with a big WOOHOO once I have this configuration 
> working....
> 
> Thanks again for your helps...
> 
> ~Malcolm
> 
> > 
> > ~~ Ricardo
> 

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