Re: Using Guix inside a Guix container

[James Thomas]

Konrad Hinsen wrote:

> Hi Guix,
>
> I have been playing with nested Guix containers recently, with some
> suprising findings, and I am wondering if what I am doing is considered
> officially supported or not.
>
> First: why? My use case is scientific workflows, for example using
> snakemake. I want to run my workflows in Guix containers, for
> reproducibility plus other reasons. But my workflows run other programs
> in their tasks (basically just "shelling out"), and those tasks may use
> their own Guix containers.
>
> Superficially, this works fine if I add the "guix" package to my "outer"
> container and expose the store plus the daemon's socket:
>
>     guix shell -C guix \
>       --expose=/var/guix/daemon-socket/socket \
>       --expose=/gnu/store \
>       -- \
>       guix shell -C coreutils -- ls /
>
> But now for the first surprise:
>
>    $ guix describe
>    Generation 35      janv. 19 2023 12:34:57  (current)
>      guix 8221cb6
>        repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>        branch: master
>        commit: 8221cb6d2ae5624829bf514d25ae234c073e35d5
>
>    $ guix shell -C guix -- guix describe
>      guix 9fe5b49
>        repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>        branch: master
>        commit: 9fe5b490df83ff32e2e0a604bf636eca48b9e240
>
> The Guix in my container is an older one, apparently the 1.4.0 release.
> Why? Can I change this?

Makes sense to me, because the guix package definition was only updated
with the new release (see 'guix edit guix'). Maybe you can try:

  guix shell -C guix --with-version=guix=VERSION -- guix describe

Or --with-commit etc.

>
> My first attempt was time-machine:
>
>     guix shell -C -N guix nss-certs \
>       --expose=/var/guix/daemon-socket/socket \
>       --expose=/gnu/store \
>       -- \
>       guix time-machine -C channels.scm -- describe
>
>    Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at 
> 'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'...
>    Authenticating channel 'guix', commits 9edb3f6 to 8221cb6 (331 new 
> commits)...
>    Computing Guix derivation for 'x86_64-linux'... |
>      guix 8221cb6
>        repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>        branch: master
>        commit: 8221cb6d2ae5624829bf514d25ae234c073e35d5
>
> Great! Except that every time I run this command, it does the channel
> update from scratch, so it's prohibitively slow. Sharing
> ${HOME}/.cache/guix seems to fix that. So... finally...
>
>     guix shell -C -N guix nss-certs \
>       --expose=/var/guix/daemon-socket/socket \
>       --expose=/gnu/store \
>       --share=${HOME}/.cache/guix \
>       -- \
>       guix time-machine -C channels.scm \
>       -- \
>       shell -C coreutils \
>       -- \
>       ls /
>
>      guix shell: error: mount: mount "none" on
>      "/tmp/guix-directory.vpOEDC/sys": Operation not permitted

Maybe --expose tmp is needed in the outer container.

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