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

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Cook, Malcolm <MEC at stowers.org> writes:

> Certainly per-user profiles must be network readable , since they wind
> up on PATH.  Perhaps within /gnu/guix/profiles/per-user?

I have configured guix such that the $localstatedir is /gnu/var, so I
only have to export /gnu.

> However, if `guix` command is enabled (using ssh/pipe/??) to run in
> networked environment with build and other work continuing to be
> coordinated by guix-daemon, then updates to per-user profiles
> similarly would need to be coordinated.  For example, if a user wants
> to `guix package --install somePkg-someVersion` then that package must
> be protected against any "simultaneous" garbage collection.  Running
> the --install through the network daemon is the guix way of protecting
> against such a race condition.

Correct.  With a shared store there must be a shared daemon.  An
alternative setup would be to have completely separate stores and reduce
build work by using ‘guix publish’.

Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to test a setup where the local
‘guix’ command talks via SSH/socat to a central guix-daemon.  (I’ve been
trying to improve the performance in our situation where the store is
located on a central file server and the daemon operates on the NFS
share.  This is rather slow here and could only partially be improved by
disabling deduplication.)

~~ Ricardo