Re: Questions regarding "Relocatable" option

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Yoann,

YOANN P <address@hidden> skribis:

> - Could we hope to see it included in the next release ?

It’s definitely gonna be there.  :-)  Guix is mostly rolling release, in fact.

> - Could we hope to see it included by default in the binary tar.gz of this 
> next release to be able to use guix directly in an unprivileged environment ? 
> ( i dreaming of this every night ^^ )

I experimented with it a bit a reported my findings here:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-05/msg00139.html

In short it’s still inconvenient, so it won’t happen for this release.

To address the main limitation, I thought we could have a
“--relocatable” package transformation option as well¹ that people could
use to automatically wrap what they install.  Food for thought…

¹ 
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Package-Transformation-Options.html

> - Does the "relocatable" could be the default option and have an 
> "--no-relocatable" option for people who want to avoid the little extra time 
> to start an application ?

We already discussed this a while back, I think.  :-) I think the
default should remain unchanged given the extra overhead (in space and
build time, not just startup time of the resulting binaries) that
wrappers introduce, and given that user namespaces are missing on many
systems still.

Thanks,
Ludo’.