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

[Cook, Malcolm]

> Cook, Malcolm <MEC at stowers.org> writes:
> 
> > Also, you discussed need for setting NIX_STATE_DIR.  This should not
> > be needed if guix was already installed with configuration of
> > --localstatedir=/guix/var (with /guix being nfs mounted), right?
> 
> NIX_STATE_DIR is used to override localstate at runtime.  If you are happy
> with the localstatedir (defined at configure time) you do not need
> NIX_STATE_DIR.  After my vacation I’ll take some time to think about how to
> allow users to run “guix” on cluster nodes to manipulate their profiles — and
> how to reliably set this all up.  I’m planning on documenting this, both in a
> specialised form for my blog and in a more generic fashion for the Guix
> manual.

Great - thanks for clarifying - I am looking forward to reading about this further in both places.  

I will eventually care about the cluster use case, but for now my first aim is to ensure that users at my institute can expect an identical experience in using guix regardless of which of our multiple shared-used computational servers they are logged into.

> 
> > Ricardo also wrote "For ‘guix package’ to work,
> > /gnu/var/guix/profiles/per-user must be shared read-write (over NFS)
> > with correct UID mapping." - I really don't understand this and tried
> > to elicit feedback in
> > http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00216.html
> > - Can anyone give me clarification on this.  I though the guix daemon
> > is going to manage these profiles.
> 
> I don’t remember writing this or the context in which I wrote this (could it be
> that Ludovic wrote this?) — looking at the code for guix/scripts/package.scm
> it seems that the client performs some of the symlink switching when
> switching generations (e.g. after installing a new package).  For that to work it
> would need write permission to the user’s profile directory.

Ricardo I am sorry, you are correct, I was quoting Ludovic in a thread where you replied https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2015-07/msg00042.html 

> (I could be completely wrong here.  That’s not how it’s set up here and I
> haven’t yet tested a configuration like this.)

I hope to chime in further with a big WOOHOO once I have this configuration working....

Thanks again for your helps...

~Malcolm

> 
> ~~ Ricardo