Re: System-wide config

[Felix Lechner]

Hi Etienne,

On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 5:38 AM Etienne B. Roesch
<etienne.roesch@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am working my way through our IT department to convince them to provide 
> guix as a
> service to our researchers.

Congratulations! You should find some like-minded folks here.

> Specifically, we provide vms as a service and we also have a shared slurm 
> resource.
> One question I haven’t managed to answer fully is about system-wide 
> configurations.
> We currently use puppet to pull configs on the fly and various scripts to 
> turn on or off
> services.

I use neither puppet, slurm or a lot of VMs and am therefore not a
good person to address your questions. I hope someone else steps up to
help you out.

> What is the recommended way to do this with guix system?

I am not sure it's possible to combine Guix System with such a setup.

> Does guix system play nicely with packages installed outside of guix?

Guix System will tolerate static third-party binaries that rely solely
on system calls. Providing prerequisites to scripts or dynamically
linked third-party software, however, may be a challenge.

Most Guix packaging replaces paths to prerequisites by absolute paths
into our store. It happens when packages are built. There are ways to
fake a standard Linux file system hierarchy, but I have not used it.

> The alternative of simply using guix on a host debian is appealing, of course.

I would start with that.

You will lose out on some benefits in the beginning, but the goodwill
you will swiftly earn with your IT department may allow you to switch
to Guix System later. Guix System is an IT administrator's dream. Just
make sure they see the "roll-back" features at some point.

Please have a good week also, and thank you for promoting Guix!

Kind regards
Felix