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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 10:42:09PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> 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.

Indeed.

> 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).

For these “guix archive -f docker” may also be handy (and safer)?

Cheers,
Ludo’.