Re: Profiles/manifests-related command line interface enhancements

[Andy Wingo]

On Sun 10 Nov 2019 10:36, Konrad Hinsen <address@hidden> writes:

> One direction could be to add a sandboxing feature to Guile, which would
> be nice-to-have for other uses as well if Guile is to become a
> general-purpose systems scripting language. There are some interesting
> ideas in shill (http://shill.seas.harvard.edu/) for this scenario.

I wrote this for that purpose:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Sandboxed-Evaluation.html

However I can't recommend it as a robust security layer because of the
weaknesses in the heap allocation limit; discussed in the page above.

I agree that Shill has some great patterns that go beyond what Guile or
Guix has, and that adopting some of them is a really interesting idea
:-)

I admit that I was a bit depressed at the impact that Spectre et al has
had on language-level sandboxing abstractions :-( and haven't much
pursued this line since then.  In practice Guix's "containerized" build
jobs are much more effective than in-language barriers.

Cheers,

Andy