I don't want a full port, at least I'm pretty sure I don't; consider, with my current setup I'm always running the Docker daemon on a Linux host. In a bash shell running on MacOS, I'm using the client-side command-line Docker tools (the three I mentioned previously), which have been ported; and the Mac edition of VirtualBox is obviously running on MacOS as well.
Is there any possibility of using the guix command-line tools, ported to MacOS, which would then talk to a remote Linux host (could be in the cloud, could be a VirtualBox VM running locally on my mac laptop, etc.)? Does guix envision a client/server "mode" of usage?
You can use the guix command line tool and let it talk to a remote guix-daemon. I would not know how to set this up on a Mac, but Guix is in fact designed such that the command line tool is separate from the daemon.
I'm using this feature to provide users of our scientific compute clusters with a way to manage their software on all cluster nodes. The Guix tool on the nodes connects to one central guix-daemon.
That's all GNU/Linux, though. I don't know if this could work on a Mac. You could ask on guix-devel@gnu.org or on #guix at freenode.
Is there any possibility of using the guix command-line tools, ported to MacOS, which would then talk to a remote Linux host (could be in the cloud, could be a VirtualBox VM running locally on my mac laptop, etc.)? Does guix envision a client/server "mode" of usage?