Subject: Re: [bug#75810] [PATCH 0/6] Rootless guix-daemon

From: Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:20:42 +0100

Ludovic Courtès writes:

Hello!

> That guix-daemon runs as root is not confidence-inspiring for many.

Certainly, in fact, this and the many build users was [sadly?] the
reason I didn't look further into Nix around 2010 or so...

[..]

> This patch changes guix-daemon so it can run as an unprivileged
> user, using unprivileged user namespaces to still support isolated
> builds.

Yay, awesome!

> There’s a couple of cases where root is/was still necessary:

[..]

> There’s another issue: /gnu/store can no longer be remounted
> read-only (like we do on Guix System and on systemd with
> ‘gnu-store.mount’) because then unprivileged guix-daemon would
> be unable to remount it read-write (or at least I couldn’t find
> a way to do that).  Thus ‘guix-install.sh’ no longer installs
> ‘gnu-store.mount’ in that case.  It’s a bit sad to lose that
> so if anyone can think of a way to achieve it, that’d be great.

Hmm.  So this is is about using guix as a package manager on foreign
systems, for now?  Will there be an option for users to choose between
a non-root guix-daemon or a read-only store?

I'm kind of afraid that having a writable /gnu/store, even if it's just
on foreign distributions, is going to cause a whole lot of problems/bug
reports with people changing files in the store.  When I came to guix I
ran it on Debian for a couple of months and I certainly changed files in
the store, even with the read-only mount hurdle, to "get stuff to
build".  Only later to realise that by doing so I was making things much
more difficult for myself.

Hopefully I'm either misunderstanding this patch set, or else too
pessimistict, and maybe other people aren't as stupid as I was when I
first came to Guix?

Greetings,
Janneke

-- 
Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <[email-masked]>  | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
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