Using guix package manager in qubes

Anybody doing it? I am talking about using guix for installing packages on a debian-12, whonix-17, etc qube (appVM). The discussion on the forum so far seems to have been around using guix inside standaloneVMs.

As far as I understand from watching a few guix package manager videos on youtube, guix creates a directory under /gnu/store/. Since this is outside the /home/user/ directory, I am assuming that this is a problem for using guix as a package manager inside a qube.

Any comments?

This can be useful in getting the guix dirs persistent in qubes

http://qubesosfasa4zl44o4tws22di6kepyzfeqv3tg4e3ztknltfxqrymdad.onion/doc/bind-dirs/

Long story short, since it seems like guix package manager writes to /gnu/store/ directory, in normal qubes, the changes in there don’t survive a reboot. But, turning that dir in a bind-dir seems to make it survive a reboot, and enable using guix inside a qube.

Also related topics:

It should works exactly like for Nix, except the path is /gnu/ instead of /nix/.

Guix is an old fork of Nix, but they maintained the architecture.

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You might also want to look into the guix pack command. The --relocatable flag will let you install Guix packages to your home directory (though I’m not sure if substitutes will work with this). -f squashfs will save the packages to a disk image and you should be able to automatically mount it in your /rw/config/rc.local (in theory, I haven’t tested this).