Re: System configuration on non-native Guix (SuSE/Debian)

[Carlo Zancanaro]

On Sun, Aug 19 2018, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> One thing I have always wanted to do is use Guix' system 
> configuration capabilities on top of Debian. But, so far, I have 
> no idea how to go about that.

I would also be interested in this. I have thought about it a 
little bit, but I haven't made any concrete steps towards making 
it happen.

> Can someone help? We can make a blog out of it. Say I want to 
> configure Nginx as a system tool using Guix. What would be the 
> steps to take? A simple example would help a lot!

For something like nginx it might be possible to reuse the code in 
(gnu services web) which generates a config file for nginx. This 
would be a very simplistic way of doing things, though, and 
wouldn't really solve the problem generally.

It would be cool if we could instantiate a given service graph on 
the currently running system, although working out how to do this 
without interfering with the host distribution sounds tricky. 
GuixSD assumes that it's in control of the entire system, so the 
easiest way to do this might well be start up an isolated GuixSD 
system in a container/vm. If we wanted to run on the host 
distribution we'd at least have to come up with a different set of 
base services, because %base-services would almost certainly 
conflict with the host distribution.

> And a separate question: can the shepherd run next to systemd? I 
> would think so. I have no real love for systemd, but it is 
> rather hard to avoid on recent distros.

You could start an instance of the Shepherd as a systemd service. 
I use the Shepherd to manage my user sessions, but I use systemd 
to start it when it's available. If you start it under systemd 
then you can't shutdown/restart using the Shepherd, but everything 
else should work properly.

Carlo

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