Subject: [bug#30256] [PATCH 3/3] scripts: environment: Add --no-cwd.

From: Mike Gerwitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2018 13:03:02 -0500

On Sat, Mar 03, 2018 at 15:44:43 +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Also---I thought the decision was that this patchset was inappropriate
>> for `guix environment`; did I misinterpret?
>
> My initial reaction was that we shouldn’t stretch ‘guix environment’ to
> do something that’s unrelated to environment management.
>
> However as I looked at your patches, I found that the additions you made
> are useful per se (for instance I’ve been wanting ‘--link-profile’ on a
> couple of occasions for reasons like the one you gave, Fontconfig,
> etc.).  And the patches had tests, documentation, and everything, so it
> seemed more beneficial to include them.  :-)

Okay, sounds good.

>> Thanks for taking a look at and applying these.  If there are better
>> solutions, I'm fine with that---I just wanted a proof-of-concept to
>> start the discussion.  Though, starting the discussion and then ducking
>> out for other obligations wasn't quite what I had in mind...
>
> Sure.  I think the issue of least-authority execution of programs
> remains open anway.  Do we want a ‘guix run’-like command?  Something in
> the shell, but which shell(s) then?  Automatically-generated wrappers so
> we don’t depend on specific shells?

One thing in particular about using `guix environment --ad-hoc' that is
particularly unfortunate with how I'm abusing it is that it will build
new derivations as necessary (as it is supposed to).  So "starting
icecat" in a container isn't just that.  I recently upgraded Guix, and
icecat isn't available on Hydra yet, so I'm unable to start icecat at
all until it compiles, which is hours on an X200 (though I'm assuming
that reverting ~/.config/guix/latest might allow me to work around it
temporarily with an old version).  This would not have been a problem
with a normal icecat installation in my profile.

Obviously the desirable behavior is to just containerize whatever is in
your profile, if possible.  Maybe the script you sent me does just
that.  I'm excited to play around with it, I just can't atm. :(

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
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https://mikegerwitz.com