Re: guix archive export/import and software deployment

[Ludovic Courtès]

Chris Marusich <address@hidden> skribis:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Does that basically achieve a similar effect as the following in Nix?
>
> https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sec-nix-copy-closure

‘nix-copy-closure’ can be thought of as an rsync for the store, built on
top of archives (archives in “nar” format, as produced by ‘guix archive’
and other tools.)

We have that functionality in ‘guix offload’¹, which basically works by
running ‘guix archive --missing’ on the remote machine, but I think it
would be nice to have a standalone ‘guix copy’ command based on
Guile-SSH.

Ludo’.

¹ http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/scripts/offload.scm#n445