Re: [EXTERNAL]Re: Modifying squashfs usage for `guix pack` for supporting singularity

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Josh,

Josh Marshall <address@hidden> skribis:

> Thanks for getting back to me on this.
>
> For the options I mentioned in the email, and the one not yet tracked
> in email since it is only in IRC is "--no-recovery".  These are what
> stood out to me when reading the `mksquashfs` documentation (
> https://github.com/plougher/squashfs-tools/blob/master/USAGE ) and
> looking at `guix/scripts/pack.scm'.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it’s still not clear to me why these
options would be needed, especially since images produced with ‘guix
pack -f squashfs’ today appear to work well.

What am I missing?

> The knowledge you're saying about the `guix pack` options is not
> communicated by `guix pack --list-formats`, which yields
>
> ```
> $ guix pack --list-formats
> The supported formats for 'guix pack' are:
>
>   tarball       Self-contained tarball, ready to run on another machine
>   squashfs      Squashfs image suitable for Singularity
>   docker        Tarball ready for 'docker load'
> ```

Right, it just says “docker”, not “OCI”.  The manual is a bit more
verbose:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html

What would you suggest adding?

> All this seems to be tangential to the fact that `guix pack --format=squashfs 
> ...` fails on CentOS7 for an undescribed reason:
> ```
> $ guix pack --format=squashfs bash-minimal

[...]

> \builder for 
> `/gnu/store/saar594fgxibr6vkrpjq2n2l5mpyycpp-squashfs-pack.gz.squashfs.drv' 
> failed with exit code 1
> build of 
> /gnu/store/saar594fgxibr6vkrpjq2n2l5mpyycpp-squashfs-pack.gz.squashfs.drv 
> failed
> View build log at 
> '/var/log/guix/drvs/sa/ar594fgxibr6vkrpjq2n2l5mpyycpp-squashfs-pack.gz.squashfs.drv.bz2'.

Could you email address@hidden with the command above, the output of
‘guix describe’, and the contents of
/var/log/guix/drvs/sa/ar594fgxibr6vkrpjq2n2l5mpyycpp-squashfs-pack.gz.squashfs.drv.bz2
 ?

CentOS 7 runs a very old kernel, so it could be that we’re using some
unsupported feature.

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.