Re: Building, packaging and updating Guix with confidence

[zimoun]

Hi Bengt,

On mar., 26 juil. 2022 at 03:09, Bengt Richter <bokr@bokr.com> wrote:

> I naively don't buy the rationale against a non-root guix daemon :)

For sure, we can imagine many other designs than the current implemented
one.  However, at one point or the other, “something with privileges” is
required, no?

I mean, consider that the user named Alice installs the package ’foo’
and the user named Bob installs the package ’foo’ too, then, to have a
shared store, “something” needs to know that ’foo’ is installed by Alice
*and* Bob.  I mean, the paths contained by the binaries need to be
hard-coded (for reproducibility), so a common location is required and
this common location requires special privileges to be manipulated.
Moreover, this “something” also requires some privileges to run isolated
environments (build, etc.),

Well, at the end, this “something” needs the same privileges as ’root’,
no?  I mean, it appears to me the simplest; especially to configure on
various foreign distros.

Pjotr wrote, some time ago, some explanations [1] for running Guix with
non-root daemon.

1: <https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/GUIX-NO-ROOT.org>


Cheers,
simon