That article made me warm up to guix and its practical side. Are guix app bundles just bare tar archives with /usr/local prefix semantics or do they need special metadata files? How are compiled binaries with hardcoded and/or autoconf'd prefixes handled for relocation (I guess using Linux namespaces somehow)?
In Guix every package ends up in its own directory, which may have references to other packages in /gnu/store. An application bundle is really just a package closure, i.e. the directory for the package and all directories it references, recursively. One way to bundle up things is with `tar` (the default of `guix pack`), but Guix also supports other bundling targets, such as Docker. No special metadata files are required.
Relocation currently requires a little C wrapper, which uses Linux namespaces, as the blog post indicates.
If you want something more advanced, such as a bundle that includes an init and services, it's best to use `guix system`, which builds VM images among others.
