Hi Ethan, Ethan Blanton <e...@kb8ojh.net> skribis:
> I am using guix shell to create an isolated container, but using a > persistent home directory to preserve configuration and state for the > program in the container. Specifically, I am using (lightly > simplified; note that the user is elb and the manifest contains ONLY > syncthing): > > CONTAINER_HOME=/path/to/persistent/home > MANIFEST=/path/to/manifest.scm > > guix shell --container --network --no-cwd -P \ > --share=$CONTAINER_HOME=/home/elb -- \ > /bin/sh -c 'SSL_CERT_DIR="$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/ssl/certs" > syncthing' > > Because syncthing requires a certificate store, the easiest way to > configure that seemed to be through the profile /etc dir, which meant > using -P. The above command works, and works correctly, but only the > first time the profile is started. I guess it’s confusing because ‘-P’ and ‘--share’ kind of step on each other’s toes: they both want to control /home/elb. > On subsequent starts, guix complains that: > > guix shell: error: cannot link profile: '/home/elb/.guix-profile' already > exists within container > > This is easily worked around by removing .guix-profile from the > --share-bound home directory before invoking guix shell. > > It is not clear to me that this is a bug, but it was surprising. It > was also surprising that there was not an obvious way to simply > declare a persistent home directory for a container, although now that > I understand the `guix shell` command better, I find this less > surprising than I did when I was first exploring. Yeah, I’m not sure how to better handle that; the two options are conflicting. That said, for this particular use case, you could do: guix shell syncthing nss-certs openssl -- syncthing Adding ‘openssl’ to the mix is a trick to ensure that SSL_CERT_DIR is defined, thanks to the search path mechanism: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Search-Paths.html Thoughts? Ludo’.
