Re: Include Proot-static with binary releases

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

YOANN P <address@hidden> skribis:

> Is there any plan to include "proot-static" with Guix Binary releases ?

Good question!

> My request is motivated by the fact i'm looking for a way to use/install Guix 
> only with the bin release on a non-privileged environnement (HPC, non root 
> user) without the need to use guix pack on another computer to create a 
> "pack" only for this package for every architecture i would like to install 
> Guix on.
>
> This way, if namespaces are not available, we could use Guix with Proot 
> without any more efforts.

Indeed.  (I assume you read
<https://guix-hpc.bordeaux.inria.fr/blog/2017/10/using-guix-without-being-root/>,
which is about running software from a pack, rather than running Guix
itself.  Pjotr has a very good writeup on this topic, which includes
running Guix itself under PRoot:
<https://gitlab.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/GUIX-NO-ROOT.org>.)

Including proot-static makes a lot of sense and easily done (it adds
3 MiB to the result.)  We’d need to document it properly though,
probably with a new section under “Setting Up the Daemon”.  We could
mention user namespaces as another option for non-root users.

Thoughts?  Ricardo?

Ludo’.