Re: Introducing ‘guix pack’

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Tue 14 Mar 2017 14:42, address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> If we remove /var/guix/profiles, users will have to actually type
>> /gnu/store/asasdfadfgsadfa-profile/bin/guile.  This is not great, but I
>> don’t know what else could be done.  We could profile a
>> /bin/guile → /gnu/store/asasdfadfgsadfa-profile/bin/guile symlink, but
>> perhaps that’s risky too.
>
> As we were discussing in the channel, maybe it's OK for these binary
> installs to claim "/opt/gnu".  Then we expose the profile in /opt/gnu,
> so you would run Guile as /opt/gnu/bin/guile.  Additionally you could
> actually build against that Guile, which would be pretty neat.  If the
> user untars multiple guix packs, /gnu/store easily absorbs the union,
> and /opt/gnu will adjoin any new profile directories/files and replace
> any overwritten links.
>
> We would have to make sure the union directory in /opt/gnu has all real
> directories and only symlink files, as per the recent patch on
> guix-devel.

Commit 5895ec8aa234ec9a4ce68ab8f94e795807630168 takes a slightly
different approach (it doesn’t use the union thing).

You can run:

  guix pack guile-next \
    --symlink=/opt/gnu/bin/guile=bin/guile \
    --symlink=/opt/gnu/bin/guild=bin/guild

and that does what you would expect.

In addition, /var/guix is no longer included by default.

Let me know what you think!

Ludo’.