Re: Defining user services in Guix.

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Mekeor Melire <address@hidden> writes:

> Mathieu Othacehe <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>>> But you can start your own shepherd under your user account and have that 
>>>> shepherd manage user services - it's nice.
>>
>> Thank you Danny for the details procedure. I'll use that for now !
>>
>>> Surely we could do better, like providing unprivileged users with a tool
>>> akin to ‘guix system reconfigure’ but to manage their own services.
>>> This came up several times in the past.
>>
>> Well, I think it's too bad that user services can't be handled as easily
>> as the other services in Guix.
>>
>> I would be eager to participate to some sort of guix system reconfigure
>> --user-services that would allow people to write and share their
>> unpriviledged services :).
>
> Btw, beside user-specific services, we also already discussed
> user-specific aliases for the `guix ...` commands. So now, there are at
> least two things a user-specific configuration file could contain. :)
>
> One, the system.scm would contain
>
>      (operating-system
>         ; ...
>         (services
>             ; ...
>         ))
>
> And secondly, each user could have a user.scm e.g. like
>
>     (user-configuration
>         ; ...
>         (aliases
>             '(
>                 ("sysrec" "system reconfigure")
>                 ("pl"     "pull")
>                 ; ...
>             ))
>         (services
>             (emacs-daemon-service)
>             (dzen-service)
>             ; ...
>             ))
>
> or similar :)

While I’m not a fan of Guix-specific aliases, I think it’s not a bad
idea to use Guix for user configurations.  I’m tired of having to keep
track of a set of custom configuration files scattered all over the
place, but I’m not sure how to approach this without going overboard.

To stay on the topic of user services: I think they do have a place in
Guix and could be defined with the same mechanisms that we have for
system services.

--
Ricardo

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