bug#31669: 'guix system' enhancements

[Rutger Helling <rhelling@mykolab.com>]

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Hi Ludo,

That might cause confusion like you said, so I'm not sure if that would
be an improvement.

I guess I was wondering whether there was an easy way to do something
like build your entire system with a newer Mesa, or use LibreSSL 
instead of OpenSSL as mentioned. Of course you could change your own
git checkout, but that's not as elegant as '--with-input/--with-graft'
etc.

Another option would be to make your own transformed packages and add
those as services instead of the regular versions. Unfortunately a lot
of services right now don't have that option (OpenSSH for example).
Plus you're pretty liable to make a mistake that way.

On Fri, 01 Jun 2018 14:58:03 +0200
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Rutger Helling <rhelling@mykolab.com> skribis:
> 
> > This isn't really a bug, but I noticed that 'guix system' right now
> > cannot use certain common build options like 'with-input'. I don't
> > know how hard it would be to add that, because I think it could be
> > pretty useful for something like the following for example:
> >
> > guix system reconfigure --with-input=openssl=libressl system.scm  
> 
> Note that ‘--with-input’ & co. are *package* transformation options,
> so the question is which packages we’d apply them to.
> 
> We could take those options as applying to all the packages in the
> global profile, but it may not be exactly what people would expect
> because it would not apply to packages used by Shepherd services.
> 
> WDYT?
> 
> Ludo’.


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