Ludovic Courtès writes: >>> As noted in the ‘guix pull’ news, you can use ‘--writable-root’. >>> Otherwise, everything but the current directory and /tmp is read-only. >> >> Does that make sense though? You have already made an exception for >> /tmp, I would argue that ~ is another candidate for special-casing. >> >> I think people would reasonably expect that touching a file in your own >> home should work. But it does not: >> >> $ guix shell --no-cwd -C coreutils bash -- sh -c 'touch ~/foo' >> touch: cannot touch '/home/user/foo': Read-only file system >> >> >> Some software just fails to start in the container: >> >> $ guix shell --no-cwd -C deluge -- deluged >> 20:22:20 [ERROR ][deluge.common:136 ] Unable to use default config directory, exiting... ([Errno 30] Read-only file system: '/home/user/.config') > > It’s surprising that deluged tries to write to ~/.config, In absence of the configuration, it generates default one and stores it into the ~/.config/deluge. This behavior is sensible for this specific program. > but yeah, more generally, I agree that many programs will want to > write to ~/.cache and the likes. > > So hmm, maybe we can make another exception? It doesn’t hurt anyway > since it’s a tmpfs. Yeah, I agree. I can try to produce a patch (I should have some time on Sunday), but obviously anyone feel free to step in. Tomas -- There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.