Great :). I would make it a little clearer that this is 'bootstrapping' and hype it a little more that now there is no reason NOT to install Guix. Only 100Mb on your HDD.
The warning about overwriting a Guix installation should be earlier. Maybe point out that if you want to move a package with dependencies see another part of the documentation. BTW when Nix decided to go for a meta-database they lost something. I know it has good reasons (performance mostly) but it took away the self-containedness of packages. It would be nice just to be able to copy/del packages and rebuild the meta information. Do we have something like that? Pj. On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:31:09PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > I???ve documented installation from the binary tarball (which I plan to > distribute for the next release) in commit 09722b1. Please let me know > what you think. > > Ludo???. > > > 2.1 Binary Installation > ======================= > > This section describes how to install Guix on an arbitrary system from a > self-contained tarball providing binaries for Guix and for all its > dependencies. This is often quicker than installing from source, which > is described in the next sections. The only requirement is to have > GNU tar and Xz. > > Installing goes along these lines: > > 1. Download the binary tarball from > ???ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz???(1), > where SYSTEM is ???x86_64-linux??? for an ???x86_64??? machine already > running the kernel Linux, and so on. > > 2. As ???root???, run: > > # cd / > # tar xf guix-binary-0.8.2.SYSTEM.tar.xz > > This creates ???/gnu/store??? (*note The Store::), ???/var/guix???, and > ???/root/.guix-profile???. ???/root/.guix-profile??? is a ready-to-use > profile for ???root??? where Guix is installed. > > 3. Setup the daemon as explained below (*note Setting Up the > Daemon::), and run it: > > # /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon > --build-users-group=guix-builder > > 4. Make the ???guix??? command available to other users on the machine, > for instance with: > > # mkdir -p /usr/local/bin > # cd /usr/local/bin > # ln -s /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix > > And that???s it! > > There are two things to note. First, don???t unpack the tarball on a > working Guix system since that would overwrite its own essential files. > Second, the ???guix??? package must remain available in ???root??????s > profile, or > it would become subject to garbage collection???in which case you would > find yourself badly handicapped by the lack of the ???guix??? command. > > The tarball in question can be (re)produced simply by running the > following command in the Guix source tree: > > make guix-binary.SYSTEM.tar.xz > > ---------- Footnotes ---------- > > (1) As usual, make sure to download the associated ???.sig??? file and to > verify the authenticity of the tarball against it! > --