Re: Copying whole /gnu/store from USB does not work

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi Ludo,

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 01:48:34PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:
> 
> > I thought I would be able to bootstrap using a USB image and copy
> > /gnu/store to a local hard disk.
> 
> To ???bootstrap,??? it???s best to install Guix on top of your distro, and
> build/download packages from there.  (Actually bootstrapping doesn???t
> require any special action with Guix.)

Well yes, you need to install all prerequisites and that is not always
trivial. Try bootstrapping on an old Centos install, for example.
Can't even get Docker going there.

It would be nice to have an installable binary tar ball for Guix. Just
unpack in root and go...

> > mount it with kpartx
> >
> >     kpartx -v -a gnu-usb-install-0.8.x86_64-linux
> >     mkdir mnt 
> >     mkdir tmp
> >     mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 mnt
> >     cp -vau mnt/gnu tmp
> >     mv tmp/gnu/ /
> 
> That cannot work.

I am merely trying to be clever ;)

> The reason is that the store is really two things: /gnu/store, and
> /var/guix/db/db.sqlite.  The latter contains meta-data about the former,
> notably the list of valid store items.

Aha. That makes sense. If I also copy the db.sqlite it might just
work then.

> The valid way to do that is with ???guix archive??? (info "(guix) Invoking
> guix archive"), or using the ???populate-store??? and ???register-closure??? 
> as
> is done in (gnu build vm).

OK, I'll take a look. Thanks. 

Pj.

PS I am rather excited that you have LLVM going and Python packages
and that Ricardo is adding bioinformatics packages. Way to go!! Now we
need to add Ruby gems and GNU Guix will be the default deployment
system for many.