[Nix-dev] In multi-user Nix, let the daemon handle creation of GC roots

sbaugh at catern.com sbaugh at catern.com
Sun Jun 18 04:49:55 CEST 2017


My understanding is that currently GC roots (symlinks in
profiles/gcroots) are created and deleted directly by the various Nix
tools, even in multi-user configurations. (whether on NixOS or on
another Linux distribution)

It seems to me that it would be useful for the daemon to handle making
GC roots, and forbid users to directly create GC roots.

The features that come to mind:
- Allows later implementing policy about GC roots/space consumption
- Allows avoiding complicated locking around doing GC
- Allows /nix to be put on network storage transparently
- Allows /nix to be shared between containers transparently

The network-storage-/nix use case may be the most important, since there
seems to be a lot of people who want to put /nix on NFS.

Thoughts? Has this been considered?

Thanks for Nix!



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