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Ludovic Courtès

It’s now possible to create a #Guix System instance where the default ‘guix’ command sees the channels of your choosing:
guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/h

This is particularly useful if you want to create a ready-to-use system image.

13 comments
Felix Lechner

@civodul Hi, thamks. That's great news! When and how does that "guix" get "pulled" please?

Ludovic Courtès

@lechner Guix is pulled when the system is built (it’s more or less the same thing as ‘guix pull’ that happens).

Felix Lechner

@civodul Hi, in the context of 'guix deploy' it almost seems that such a channel transfer should happen by default. For example, I struggle with system roll-backs because they require a local 'pull'. Could we transfer the channels by default, please?

Ludovic Courtès

@lechner You can run ‘guix system roll-back’ without having to pull first. I’m not sure what you mean.

Felix Lechner

@civodul Well, I modified my bootloader installation code.

McSinyx

@civodul, does that means it’s no longer necessary to invoke git pull manually? I’m looking for a way to avoid doing so for each user. Cc: @lechner

Felix Lechner

@civodul Also, I can't use the custom system channels yet because my Guix is several months behind. How do I disable authentication for the pull, please?

Ludovic Courtès

@lechner ‘guix pull --disable-authentication’?

(Please stop with “please”: I’m pleased you say “please” when asking for something, but it makes me feel like you think you’re talking to the user support department.)

Felix Lechner

@civodul Thanks (am I allowed to write that?) but I meant in the context of the automated pull that you wrote takes place when the system is reconfigured. The example also lacked channel introductions compared to how I use the home-channels-service-type.

Ludovic Courtès

@lechner Oh, sorry, I misunderstood the context. Hmm that’s a good point, ‘guix-for-channels’ doesn’t let you turn off authentication; we should add a flag for that.

Felix Lechner

@civodul Well, ideally I would keep authentication turned on. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? I keep a lot of patches on top of Guix and rebase them periodically. Should I do that differently?

Felix Lechner

@civodul Also, there was no real need for "sorry" but I didn't mind.

café au fait
@civodul i finally managed to give this a whirl over the last week, and it's very promising. however! the experience on my old desktop was pretty bad. it had to update its channels and rebuild guix's derivation *three* times each for "system build" and "system reconfigure", so it took well over an hour.

but this large annoyance hides a proper bug: since you have to be root to run "system reconfigure" and because that will trigger three separate channel updates and guix rebuilds over a potentially long period of time, it has a high likelihood leave behind root-owned files in the guix cache, requiring manual intervention to fix.

it's a promising start to a vision of being able to easily layer channels on bare guix, but the current implementation needs to stop constantly pulling channels and rebuilding guix. honestly, i don't think anything should ever pull guix except "guix pull". i assume there was some nasty thorn that made you have to do it this way?
@civodul i finally managed to give this a whirl over the last week, and it's very promising. however! the experience on my old desktop was pretty bad. it had to update its channels and rebuild guix's derivation *three* times each for "system build" and "system reconfigure", so it took well over an hour.
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