I am having trouble installing guix on nixos. I have specified the build users and the guix daemon systemd service in my configuration.nix file and all works.
I am then following the binary installation instructions. As root I then try to test by running
guix package -i hello
However rather than install the small hello package, guix is installing a large number of dependencies such as gcc etc. It is taking a long time. Is this normal ?
I am also having trouble setting up the environment for running guix as non-root user.
I don’t use guix myself, so take my writing with the appropriate amount of salt:
Probably yes. Similar to nix, guix builds a dependency tree and will install all dependencies. Depending on wether a binary cache is available, guix may be trying to install or even build all software that’s necessary to use the hello package. Dependencies on a libc is pretty much expected for every package and to build a libc, you probably need a compiler, which explains gcc. In case guix decided to compile those two on your system instead of using prebuilt binaries, you could be in for a wait for half an hour to a couple of hours, depending on the performance of your system.
It really depends on the exact bootstrap process that guix uses.