Subject: Re: bug#35591: Segfault on flatpak remote-add

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 May 2019 18:36:06 -0400

Hi Jonathan,

"Jonathan Frederickson" <[email-masked]> writes:
> I'm attempting to use Flatpak on my Guix system, and I'm experiencing
> segfaults when attempting to add a remote repo. Provided below are the
> output of the command I'm attempting to run, as well as some info
> about my system.

My knowledge of Flatpak is weak, but in general, foreign pre-compiled
binaries will not work on Guix unless they are statically linked.
Traditional dynamically-linked executables expect to find a dynamic
linker and system shared libraries in /lib or /lib64, which do not exist
on a Guix system.  It is also fairly common for foreign binaries to
depend on standard files and programs in /usr, /bin, and /sbin, none of
which are present on a Guix system except for /bin/sh.

Having said that, if you must run foreign pre-compiled binaries on Guix,
there are various hacks to do it.  One approach is to install symlinks
in /lib*, /usr, /bin, /sbin, etc, pointing to the needed components in
/run/current-system.  Another is to modify the pre-compiled binaries to
look for components in the right place using 'patchelf'.  We use the
latter approach to bootstrap GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler), which can
only be compiled by itself.

I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you, but Guix was not
designed to run foreign pre-compiled binaries.  If that's important to
you, it might be that Guix is not a good fit for you.

However, if your goal is to run Guix-compiled programs in a sandbox,
that's something we are certainly very interested in, and we could use
help.  We have "guix container" as a building block, and I know that
some Guix users have experimented with running e.g. GNU IceCat within a
container.  I don't know the current status of those efforts.  Hopefully
someone more knowledgable in this area will chime in.

     Regards,
       Mark