Subject: Re: bug#39925: `guix pull` failure in multi-machine setup

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 11:46:24 +0100

Hi!

Lars-Dominik Braun <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> In fact, the former would probably not work because ‘guix pull’ modifies
>> the local /var/guix/profiles, not the one on the host that runs the
>> daemon.
> Yes, /var/guix is shared via NFS too. Otherwise roaming between machines
> wouldn’t work at all.
>
>> So maybe the problem is that ‘GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET=ssh://’ isn’t quite as
>> powerful as you thought.  :-)
> It is, it’s just a bug we have to fix :) Can I help you debug this somehow,
> i.e. figure out where exactly the error message is coming from?

Well, I think you’re really asking for a new feature; we need more than
just talk to a remote daemon.

Updating profiles like ‘guix package’ and ‘guix pull’ do involve two
things:

  1. building the profile—this is done by talking to the daemon;

  2. modifying things in /var/guix/profiles & co.

GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET addresses #1 but not #2.

For #2, we would need to do something like Jakub did in (guix scripts
system reconfigure), where the effectul bits can be transparently
evaluated either locally or remotely.

But really, that’d be a brand new feature, so I’m marking it as a
wishlist if you don’t mind.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.