[Bio-packaging] Using a shared Guix store (was RE: testing out guix)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Cook, Malcolm" <MEC at stowers.org> skribis:

>> > Can anyone elaborate a little on what are the obstacles to having
>> > `/gnu` mounted read-write network wide?
>> 
>> Yes, the primary problem is that the daemon assumes that it is the only thing
>> writing to the store and the localstatedir.  Any modification of profiles and
>> the store goes through the daemon.
>> > If so, might this be mitigated using a variant off of "Using the
>> > Offload Facility"
>> > (http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Daemon-Offload-
>> Setu
>> > p) in which builds would still be offloaded (and thus subject to
>> > coordination), with the elimination of the need for " Missing
>> > prerequisites for the build are copied over SSH to the target machine,
>> > which then proceeds with the build; upon success the output(s) of the
>> > build are copied back to the initial machine" since they would be done
>> > through the shared file system?
>> 
>> Something like that has been suggested before: if the daemon were to
>> accept authenticated connections from the outside rather than to just listen
>> on a local socket we could have remote guix clients connecting to the central
>> daemon.
>
> Hmm.  So, for now, I could just teach users to, i.e., `ssh ${USER}@${GUIX_HOST}   /path/to/guix package -r lua -i guile guile-cairo` and contrive for GUIX_HOST to be defined for them.
>
> Or, wrap it up even further, and contrive for everyone to have the following in their env:
>
> 	alias guixpkg='ssh ${USER}@${GUIX_HOST} /path/to/guix package'
>
> ??

That’s a possibility.

Another one, which I think Ricardo has been investigating lately, would
be to have users manage their profiles via the Web user interface,
guix-web: <https://git.dthompson.us/guix-web.git>.  (The video
<http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/misc/2015-01__GNU_Guix__The_Emacs_of_Distros.webm>
has a demo starting at around 23mn.)

>> Currently our users are okay with that, probably to a large part because they
>> are not yet aware of all the features of Guix.  They are only used to
>> management by sysadmins or manual compilation, so they are not
>> inconvenienced.
>> 
>> Ultimately, the correct fix is to allow remote guix clients to communicate with
>> a central guix daemon.  The daemon does not even need to be aware of
>> remote connections if guix clients can transparently connect via SSH and send
>> RPCs to the socket.  This is not yet implemented.
>
> Sounds great.  On the roadmap?

Definitely.  There are details to be sorted out (SSH vs. plain old
socket), but we should discuss it and “get it done.”

Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.