Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Roel Janssen <address@hidden> writes:

> * Network-aware guix-daemon
>
>   From a user's point of view it would be cool to have a network-aware
>   guix-daemon.  In our cluster, we have a shared storage, on which we have
>   the store, but manipulating the store through guix-daemon is now limited
>   to a single node (and a single request per profile).  Having `guix' talk
>   with `guix-daemon' over a network allows users to install stuff from
>   any node, instead of a specific node.

That’s on the list as

      * client needs to be able to 
[[http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20381][connect remotely]] 
instead of using 
[[http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20381#5][‘socat’ hack]]

I’m currently using the socat hack at the MDC with a wrapper to make it
seamless for the users.

> * Profile management
>
>   The abstraction of profiles is an awesome feature of FPM, but the user
>   interface is missing.  We could do better here.
>
>   Switch the default profile
>   (and prepend values of environment variables to the current values):
>   $ guix profile --switch=/path/to/shared/profile

This could be a wrapper doing essentially this:

    bash  # sub-shell
    source /path/to/shared/profile/etc/profile
    …

>   Reset to default profile (and environment variable values without the
>   profile we just unset):
>   $ guix profile --reset

Using the above wrapper it would be equivalent to just:

    exit  # exit the sub-shell

Does this make sense or is more needed here?
We’re using the above workflow at the MDC.  It’s a little verbose and
requires users to keep track of the shell in which they are operating,
but this basically works.  Would be nice to abstract this away and hide
it behind a nicer user interface (e.g. “guix environment save” and “guix
environment load”).

~~ Ricardo