Re: OCI-backed Guix System Services

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi,

> I was recently inspired from Nix's oci-container feature and wrote a thin 
> wrapper around the docker CLI to enable the management of
> docker containers through Shepherd [0]. This enables handling of non packaged 
> services through guix system reconfigure and herd
> start/stop/status . 

Neat!

> To conclude, I'm not advocating for adding OCI-backed services to Guix 
> mainstream: in my opinion they should be bootstrapped and
> built from source, but I believe the actual "backend" implementation for such 
> services could be useful to have in Guix. What do you
> think?

I think this could still be a valuable addition to Guix, because it
integrates with Shepherd and thus unifies management of system services
independent of whether they came from Guix or from elsewhere.

Because integration with Shepherd is nice I wrote the Swineherd which
serves a related need: https://github.com/BIMSBbioinfo/swineherd

-- 
Ricardo