bug#26608: Provide --only-substitutes flag to "guix package --upgrade"

bug#26608: Provide --only-substitutes flag to "guix package --upgrade"

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Sometimes I do an upgrade and I want to get the latest security updates,
but I also am not really available to burn through a lot of cpu time,
(especially on my x200).

I'd love it if thre were a flag so that I could specify "only bother to
upgrade the packages where we only upgrade if a substitute is already
available.

Note that I looked at the source to see if this would be an easy thing
to add; I figured that this would be handled in roughly the same place
as --keep-going or --fallback, but it looks to me like those are
actually just passed over to the build daemon, so I'm not so sure how
easy it would be to patch this in while we're still using Nix's C
daemon?  I'm not sure.

bug#26608: Provide --only-substitutes flag to "guix package --upgrade"

[Ludovic Courtès]

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:

> Sometimes I do an upgrade and I want to get the latest security updates,
> but I also am not really available to burn through a lot of cpu time,
> (especially on my x200).
>
> I'd love it if thre were a flag so that I could specify "only bother to
> upgrade the packages where we only upgrade if a substitute is already
> available.

+1

> Note that I looked at the source to see if this would be an easy thing
> to add; I figured that this would be handled in roughly the same place
> as --keep-going or --fallback, but it looks to me like those are
> actually just passed over to the build daemon, so I'm not so sure how
> easy it would be to patch this in while we're still using Nix's C
> daemon?  I'm not sure.

Clients could check, among the packages that are to be installed, which
ones are substitutable (with the ‘substitute-paths’ RPC or similar) and
filter out those that are not.  No C++ involved.

Cheers,
Ludo’.

bug#26608: channels.scm supporting substitutes

[Nome Grey]

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Ludovic posted some channels.scm code in September 2018 supporting using
more substitutes.  Unfortunately his code no longer functions due to an
upgrade of guile-json in guix.

I've tried to learn enough guile to upgrade the code to the newer json
structures, and posted my changes to github at
https://github.com/nomr72/guix-substitutes-channel .  It seems to run again
now.

Maybe I can learn enough to upgrade it to check the 'guix-master'
evaluations to find the latest build of key packages.  We'll see.

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bug#32022: bug#26608: channels.scm supporting substitutes

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Nome Grey <greynome72@gmail.com> skribis:

> Ludovic posted some channels.scm code in September 2018 supporting using
> more substitutes.  Unfortunately his code no longer functions due to an
> upgrade of guile-json in guix.
>
> I've tried to learn enough guile to upgrade the code to the newer json
> structures, and posted my changes to github at
> https://github.com/nomr72/guix-substitutes-channel .  It seems to run again
> now.

Nice, thanks for sharing!

Ludo’.