Re: “guix gc”, auto gcroots, cluster deployments

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Roel,

thanks for your feedback!

> Would it be possible to add an option to retrospectively apply 
> this
> transformation?  Maybe that could work somewhat like this:
>
> $ ls -lha
> ... /home/me/projects/mrg1_chipseq/.guix-profile-1-link ->
> /gnu/store/ap0vrfxjdj57iqdapg8q83l4f7aylqzm-profile

This wouldn’t work, because we can’t read 
/home/me/projects/mrg1_chipseq/.guix-profile-1-link centrally.  In 
this particular case only the user “me” could resolve the link and 
thus migrate the link.  (I would do this semi-manually by 
impersonating the users to read their links.)

~ ~ ~

Another related problem I found is that the names of the links in 
unreadable space may have names that only make sense on the system 
where they were created.  For example, on the server “beast” we 
may mount the cluster home directory as “/clusterhome/me”, whereas 
on cluster nodes it would be mounted as “/home/me”.  When I have 
Guix record a gcroot while working on “beast” I would get a link 
that is no longer valid when I work on the cluster.

--
Ricardo