Pinning a Guix version

Hello!

In some cases, it’s useful to be able to pin a particular Guix version

and to use that version (see the RepPar paper for some examples.)

A naive way to do that is:

git clone …/guix.git my-pinned-guix

(cd my-pinned-guix; git checkout deadbeef)

guix package -L my-pinned-guix --manifest=my-manifest.scm

However, this is currently broken for several reasons:

1. ‘fold-packages’ recursively traverses ‘my-pinned-guix’ for .scm

files, and on its way it finds build-aux/build-self.scm,

tests/*.scm, and emacs/*.scm, which breaks it all. These

directories have to be explicitly removed before we can do

something.

Internally, ‘%package-module-path’ can have entries that are pairs

and where the cdr restricts the search of .scm files to a

sub-directory. We should expose that facility to -L and

‘GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH’ using some special syntax.

That way, one could do (say):

guix package -L my-pinned-guix,gnu/packages

meaning that only the ‘gnu/packages’ sub-directory is searched.

OTOH, it may be advisable to use the (guix …) modules from

‘my-pinned-guix’ and not just the (gnu packages …) modules, because

the former obviously contribute to the final result.

2. The ‘gnu/packages/patches’ sub-directory is not automatically added

to the search path, so in fact one has to run:

guix package -L my-pinned-guix \

-L my-pinned-guix/gnu/packages/patches …

so that patches are found. Not convenient.

3. When doing so, we get loads of:

;;; note: source file /tmp/guix/guix/build/perl-build-system.scm

;;; newer than compiled /home/ludo/src/guix/guix/build/perl-build-system.go

We should silence Guile.

4. Related to #1: since everything is evaluated, this is ~10 times

slower than the normal thing.

I think ‘guix pull’ would be a good place to add support for tagging

Guixes and similar, but it would be good if the naive approach above

would work just as well.

Ludo’.

See http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/18703

for a good source of inspiration!

Ludo’.

severity 22017 wishlist

Hi Ludo,

The bug [1] describes a wishlist about pinning Guix version. I think

it is almost done.

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/22017

You wrote:

which is now possible with

guix pull --commit=deadbeef

guix package -m my-manifest.scm

Moreover, "guix time-machine" also handles such use case. If I understand well.

However, you wrote:

and it is not currently supported, AFAIK.

Recently, a lot of new features have been discussed on guix-devel.

This one has not been raised: add local tags to ease the navigation

through different versions of Guix. It is not clear to me if it should

be under "guix pull", e.g., "guix pull --tag=add foo" or another

command "guix tag add foo".

Because it is an really old bug, I am not sure that this whishlist

will efficiently work as a reminder, so I am inclined to close it or

maybe change the title or raise this very tagging feature to

guix-devel.

What do you think?

Cheers,

simon

--

As source of inspiration, you provided this link:

which is now broken. )-:

Cheers,

simon

Hello!

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

Yes, pinning is definitely implemented, and much more nicely than what I

was suggesting back in 2015!

Yes, I think we should close this issue and create a new one about

tagging Guix revisions/channel instances.

Thanks!

Ludo’.

On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 at 09:34, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

done. :-)