Re: Hacks to install Guix packages without root

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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’ve thought about this (we have rewriting machinery in (guix build
grafts) that we could adjust and use), but then I thought that maybe
PRoot, unshare, and all the rest are good enough?

> 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…?

The tarballs could include proot-static and another statically-linked
program that essentially tries to call unshare(2).  Would that make
sense?

> With that we would be one step closer to the user experience of Docker
> — without having a runtime dependency on Docker.

It’s also fine to use Docker when it’s available, I think.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.