Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC

[Ben Woodcroft]

On 26/10/16 21:51, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:
>
> > Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > What they suggest is to add Guix support simply by using Guix inside of
> > Docker…  Obviously, I’m not a fan of this because of how inelegant this
> > all seems.  When it comes to bringing Guix to Galaxy I think we have
> > cultural problems to overcome, not really technical issues.
> Well, if this approach allows us to demonstrate the improvements Guix
> can bring (and to sidestep the cultural differences), it may be a good
> idea to try it.

Has anyone ever managed to get Guix to work inside docker? I attempted 
it as I intend on submitting some applications to kbase[0,1], where 
developers submit docker files to run their applications within the 
"narrative" interface i.e. web-facing interfaces to bioinformatic tools. 
I failed I think because of docker's single-process restriction. Using 
the attached (straightforward) dockerfile it fails at this step:

RUN echo "nohup ~root/.guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon 
--build-users-group=guixbuild &" > /tmp/daemon-script.sh
RUN bash /tmp/daemon-script.sh; guix pull
...
guix pull: error: build failed: cloning builder process: Operation not 
permitted

That seems to suggest that we cannot run the daemon inside a docker 
container, so I suppose we'd have to fall back on copying files from a 
store built outside docker-land, right?

Thanks, ben



[0]: http://kbase.us/
[1]: https://github.com/kbase/user_docs/blob/master/kbase-architecture.md

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