[Bio-packaging] Packaging

[Ricardo Wurmus]

> This is a good two sentence summary of the choices. I like Linuxbrew
> because it has a community around homebrew-science and works simply without
> needing root privileges. It does not do dependencies well and all of the
> other nice things Guix provides. However, practically I need something I
> can automate so that users won't need root privileges to install.
> Getting people to pre-install Guix on clusters is going to be a hard sell.

Maybe I was just lucky, but getting Guix "installed" on our clusters was
really easy --- maybe because we actually don't have it installed on the
clusters at all.

I asked our cluster admins for one thing only: an NFS share to be
mounted read-only on all cluster nodes at /gnu.  That was it.  I have a
separate machine on which the NFS share is mounted writeable and where I
actually have Guix installed.  This is the point where profiles are
managed and software is installed and where the daemon runs as root.
The cluster admins don't have to install Guix everywhere for this to
work.  They already have lots of network shares mounted on the nodes;
one more share doesn't hurt.

Obviously, this approach has a couple of drawbacks, but in practice it's
not too bad.  The biggest negative impact is that users cannot manage
their profiles from *any* cluster node.  They have to visit the Guix
node to effect changes to their profiles.  But this negative impact is
dwarfed by the huge benefit of relieving them from having to wrestle
with manual compilation.  Just as they use *one* node to submit cluster
jobs, they now use *one* server to manage their software.

It's a compromise I can live with --- and apparently the cluster admins
feel the same.