Re: Building Docker images of GuixSD

[Konrad Hinsen]

Hi Chris,

> I've run GuixSD in a Docker container and returned to tell the tale!
Congratulations! And thanks for exploring all this.

> Is this helpful?  Is it worth polishing up and maintaining?  I'm not
> entirely sure, and I'd like to know what you think.

I think it is useful, mainly for reason 3:

> * If you want to run Guix on a system to which Guix hasn't been ported
>    (like macOS) but your system does run Docker, now you can run Guix on
>    that system by running it from a GuixSD Docker container.

To which I might add a less obvious one: with GuixSD nicely integrated 
into the Docker universe, it has a better chance of adoption by people 
committed to Docker, and thus a better chance of becoming a/the 
preferred way of constructing Docker images. In other words, an attempt 
to take over the (Docker) world from inside.

> For the third bullet point, I don't know of any other reasonable way to
> get Guix working in Docker (although one could certainly run Guix in a
> VM using a technology other than Docker, such as QEMU).  To run Guix,

I have been trying this approach for a while, but I am still much 
further away from running Guix on my Mac than you are.

First, QEMU: forget it on the Mac. It's not nearly as advanced/stable as 
it is under Linux. You can run Guix with QEMU under macOS, but it's slow 
and crashes a bit too often to rely on it.

I moved on to VirtualBox, which runs a basic GuixSD without any major 
problem. But what you get is an isolated virtual machine. I haven't yet 
found a usable strategy for accessing the macOS file system from GuixSD. 
VirtualBox relies on its proprietary guest OS add-ins. I suspect they 
could be ported to GuixSD from a technical point of view, but it's not a 
trivial job and you'd have to remove the term "free software" from your 
brain for a while to do it. Currently I am trying NFS, exporting my Mac 
home directory via an NFS server on the Mac (easy) and mounting it from 
GuixSD (no success so far, because of the very incomplete NFS support in 
GuixSD). I expect this will work eventually, but in terms of performance 
it will probably never get to what you can achieve with Docker.

Konrad.