Re: Installing guix packages without root permissions (in HPC environments)

[Pjotr Prins]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 10:42:09PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > To fix the prefix restriction there are two routes, one is building
> > Guix itself on a large(r) path, which is the easy route, or write a
> > relocate patcher that can handle the non-zero terminated paths. I
> > think the latter is feasible too. Even at this point the fixed length
> > strategy is useful for most environments - the prefix can be some 40
> > characters long.
> 
> I think the fixed-length restriction is not that bad.  The two
> workarounds above look hacky and super tricky, respectively.  ;-)

Yes. Also I like the fact that we use standard binaries this way that
have been well tested on Guix. If anything goes wrong the problem can
only be the relocation. That makes things tractable.

> Also, if we look at the big picture of non-root usage, this solution
> addresses the most hostile environments: no user namespaces, no
> container-spawning facility, no root guix-daemon, etc.  Granted, these
> hostile environments are still commonplace in HPC, so that’s good.  :-)

Yes, if this works it will be rather good and create awareness for
Guix. Another use-case may be firefox plugins - or other software that
wants to install binaries.  Maybe they'll wake up to guix too. From a
developers point of view Guix is awesome because it creates
reproducible environments that we can develop against. What more do we
need ;). We are now using it for a bug hunt on sambamba which only
segfaults on particular HPC setups. The guix relocatable installer is
going to help.

I'll take the installer to the level that we can do one-step installs
and provide a few packages for download to reach out to certain
communities (dlang and elixir come to mind).

Pj.
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