Hacks to install Guix packages without root

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi,

this blog post contains many great examples of how to deploy Guix
applications without root access:

    
http://guix-hpc.bordeaux.inria.fr/blog/2017/10/using-guix-without-being-root/

I think that all of these methods should be wrapped up by Guix itself,
so that none of this has to be done manually.  I’d also like to include
Pjotr’s hack in this, which involves rewriting /gnu/store references.
It’s icky but effective and one of the reasons why Conda is so popular
(they rewrite references in their binaries as well, but less principled
than, say, grafts).

How about an extension of “guix pack” that will rewrite the /gnu/store
references to a user-provided directory before bundling things up in a
tarball?  I’d *really* like to be able to just use the tarball bundle
“guix pack” produces by default, but currently deploying it requires
root access or proot shenanigans at runtime.

How about making manual hacking with unshare and chroot obsolete by
including a simple executable in the pack that handles this rewriting
for the user…?  With that we would be one step closer to the user
experience of Docker — without having a runtime dependency on Docker.

What do you think?

--
Ricardo

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