Guix questions on sharing developer envs

[Hafeez Bana]

Hi,

I am planning to use guix for sharing dev environments under non-root unix
accounts across developers.

These environment run services like mysql, a webserver etc. Installing such
software is trivial. What is the best practice for running this software? A
couple of pointed questions

1) What is the best/accepted way to store configuration and state data for
such services? It the XFG format applicable?
2) If a package ships with a set of starting configs/state data which a
developer can use to bootstrap and modify his setup. What is the best way
to 'initialize this config/state'? Is just a link to the GNU-store enough
3) What is the best way to run long lived (aka outside a shell) services
running services based around this software?

I've already asked this question in a round about way. Some people have
pointed to existing configs - but these are for running whole systems in a
container. I need something a developer can bootstrap into and modify that
could eventually run as a container in a prod env.

Thanks,
Hafeez