[shepherd]: Guix Home's shepherd masks shutdown/reboot on foreign distribution

When using guix home to manage shepherd services on a foreign

distribution the shepherd package is also added to the home-profile.

This then makes the home profile provide 'halt', 'shutdown' and 'reboot'

(and their manpages) masking the system ones.

Trying to run one of these then results in an error:

reboot: error: /var/run/shepherd/socket: No such file or directory

instead of e.g. rebooting the system.

Hi,

Dariqq <dariqq@posteo.net> skribis:

Oh, indeed. I’m not sure how to address that though. Ideas?

Ludo’.

Hi Ludo,

On 10.11.24 12:51, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

Not sure if this is something that should be addressed by shepherd or

the default shepherd package used for guix home.

Initially I had the idea to add a configure flag to shepherd to disable

"building" and installing these 5 files (which is why I reported against

shepherd). I threw something together that works but I am not really

happy with it because imo such an option should disable *all*

things that are not required when only using it for user level

services and not just the entrypoints. That would be a lot more work though.

Another (simpler solution) would be to just solve the problem in guix by

using a shepherd variant that deletes sbin and share/man/man8.

Wdyt?

Hi,

Dariqq <dariqq@posteo.net> skribis:

[...]

Yes, this sounds like a reasonable solution to me.

Ludo’.

Hi,

On 20.11.24 11:46, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

How should this work? should this be a (public?) procedure? Should it

rebuild shepherd or just copy the output with trivial-build-system?

I just thought of a more elegant solution, but this would be a lot

harder to implement properly:

- Move the sbin stuff into a seperate output

- Home shepherd service only adds the main output to the profile and

shepherd-root-service both

- Will need adjustments some packages that currently reference

shutdown/reboot ( -> lots of rebuilds because logind) and the same

change for the shepherd packages in the shepherd module.

Hi,

Dariqq <dariqq@posteo.net> skribis:

My understanding of this proposal is that there would be a

“shepherd-foreign” package, which is like “shepherd” but without

‘reboot’ and ‘halt’.

That package could be implemented with ‘trivial-build-system’ or

‘copy-build-system’ indeed, and it would symlink all of ‘shepherd’,

except its ‘sbin’ directory.

The advantage is that no extra step would be needed when using a foreign

distro. But yeah, it’s relatively intrusive, and not my favorite

solution, FWIW. Dunno.

WDYT?

Ludo’.

Hi,

On 26.11.24 16:55, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

Imo it would make sense to have the sbinless shepherd be the default

shepherd for home-shepherd s.t. the home environment never provides

shutdown/halt by default. Those are commands are for the system to take

care of (whether that is the shepherd coming from root-shepherd or the

init from the foreign system).

On my foreign distro setup i am currently using this (apologies if the

formatting turns out weird):

If we don't want to care about the manpages then the

(#:create-all-directories? #t) can be omitted in union-build.

If this would be possible without rebuilding I'd really like it because

it makes clear what part of the shepherd something depends on (service

manager stuff vs generic init stuff) and avoids an extra package that is

just shepherd minus sbindir. But the 3300 dependants of logind makes

this really unattractive.

Dariqq

Hi Dariqq,

Dariqq <dariqq@posteo.net> skribis:

I agree.

Perfect!

Would you like to submit a patch adding this package (probably with the

‘hidden?’ property), followed by a patch making it the default for Home?

Thanks,

Ludo’.

Hello,

This adds a variant of shepherd without sbin and makes it the default for home services. The reason is that when using guix home with shepherd services on a foreign distribution the default shepherd package masks commands like halt, shutdown and reboot which are usually provided by the initsystem.

Per the discussion in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/73903the package is hidden and just symlinks all the relevant files from the base shepberd to the new output.

I successfully reconfigured my home environment and confirmed that halt/reboot are now provided by my system profile.

Dariqq (2):

gnu: Add shepherd-for-home.

gnu: home: Use shepherd-for-home as the default shepherd.

gnu/home/services/shepherd.scm | 2 +-

gnu/packages/admin.scm | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

base-commit: c3290cee6add60b7e56f5f919d9498d78542790a

--

2.46.0

Change-Id: If66c7e7b688de239ca862326b51592b43ba22c25

---

gnu/packages/admin.scm | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1 file changed, 27 insertions(+)

value of shepherd field to shepherd-for-home

Change-Id: I3773403bb1fcdcbe2acb1bbcbfaa009f4d31ace4

---

gnu/home/services/shepherd.scm | 2 +-

1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)