Re: Guix "ops"

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>>  - Should I build the entire derivation of the system I want to run on
>>    the remote machine locally first, then copy that over?  (I assume
>>    this is possible, and eventually desirable, especially if doing
>>    mass deployments?  But it might not be desirable in every case.)
>>    Would that use the substitute mechanism?
>
> Yes!  :-)
>
> Essentially deployment would work like this:
>
>   1. Compute the system derivation and build it locally (i.e., on the
>      machine where ‘guix deploy’ is running.)
>
>      As a user, you can choose to have offloading setup such that the
>      actual build will take place on (some of) the target machines, but
>      that’s completely orthogonal.
>
>   2. Send the derivation out to the target(s) that are real machines.
>      For targets that are local containers or VMs, there’s nothing to
>      do.
>
>   3. On targets that are real machines, perform the equivalent of ‘guix
>      system reconfigure’—i.e., update the /run/current-system symlink,
>      restart Shepherd services that can be restarted, etc.
>
> IIRC David was testing using VMs and containers as the targets (the
> <platform> record¹) because it’s easier.
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> Hopefully David will correct me.  :-)

Ok, it does make sense!

It's nice to see the examples in the docs of exporting a system over
ssh, even.  Anyway, I played with "guix archive" this morning; it works
well.  So, sending an entire closure over the network: should be easy.

I see that there's a --missing field; I'm a little bit unsure of how two
machines would coordinate here though with the existing tooling... it
doesn't look like we have a way to export the list of packges that
--missing could then read in?  And then you'd need to feed whatever
--missing gave you back into --export I guess.

Anyway, it does seem like this is the right direction!  Exciting!
 - Chris

>
> Ludo’.
>
> ¹ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00320.html