Hi, On Mon, 06 Jul 2020 at 21:48, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > We’re drifting off-topic, but this is interesting. I just hope few > people do that, but at least it’s a reminder of the sad situation > wrt. substitute availability. I have started to do so during lockdown. I was in South of France (Millau \o/) only with my laptop which is not so much powerful. Well, on one hand it is the availability of package substitutes; but except some corner case and bad luck, in general* it is fine for me. On the other hand, I am really annoyed by building the derivations. But the new Guile compiler for derivation and other such optimizations could really improve the situation. :-) *general: well, it should not be possible to pull packages that do not build. It is rare but it happens and it is really frustrating: burn CPU and finally end with "build error". Anyway! Off-topic. > I don’t understand why you wouldn’t run ‘guix pull --news’ though. It > provides useful info beyond packages, doesn’t it? The command "guix pull --news" is useful. It provides useful information about packages, features, etc. But I read "--news" directly on guix-patches. :-) However, "guix pull --news" is not useful for what I want: find the commit backward in order to feed "guix time-machine --commit=". From my point of view, "--news" is useful forward. Other said, I delete the old generations I pulled e.g. 1 year ago so "--news" cannot work in this case. Anyway! Another off-topic. >>> In the short term, we don’t need to solve all these problems: we can >>> also go for ‘git-authenticate’ and rename it once we have these other >>> commands. >> >> I have learnt that renaming will not work. :-) >> Because backward compatibilities and break the workflow of someone. >> So I would take the other route, go for "guix git authenticate" and >> hoping that other commands would come soon. > > Well, this particular renaming would be easy: it’s really just renaming, > with a known name, a situation very different from that of ‘guix > environment’ if that’s what you were alluding to. Well, I do not think that particular renaming would be easy; as any other renaming: changing established things is hard. It is easy to add, not to remove. And from my point of view "guix git-authenticate" is not special enough to deserve a subcommand. But we all enjoy different taste of wine. :-) Anyway. Because we are drifting too much, let open another discussion and move forward this one. So, it was my bikeshedding feedback. :-) Cheers, simon