Re: guix archive export/import and software deployment

[Ludovic Courtès]

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:

> Guix archive is not working well for me. What I want is to deploy a
> package with its runtime dependencies reliably from one machine to
> another and update the profile after so it can be run, with its
> propagated dependencies.
>
> Dependencies are not all included when exporting. In fact all R
> modules are missing, but python modules are included. Ludo's earlier
> comment suggests the package is visited and harvested for runtime
> links. Apparently the R modules are not linked. Even so, they are in
> the package definition, so we should be able to capture them.

This is tricky because ‘guix archive’ does not know about packages; it
works at a lower abstraction level.

> The second problem is that there is no elegant way to recreate the
> profile now for the full thing. Obviously I have a complex product ;)

What about ‘guix package --manifest’?  Does it help?

Otherwise, is it OK to pass the whole profile around, as with:

  guix archive --export $(readlink -f ~/.guix-profile) > profile.nar

?

You’d still have to manually link to this profile on the target machine,
though:

  cd /var/guix/profiles/per-user/$USER
  ln -s guix-profile-xyz-link /gnu/store/…-the-above-profile

I think ‘guix package’ should have options to simplify this.

Ludo’.