I’m attaching the patch. Several issues must be addressed before it can be pushed: 1. ‘guix prefetch’ tries to configure and build some packages instead of just downloading them. I tried the following on a machine with the empty store: a. Ran ‘guix prefetch hello’. Some packages were downloaded and built (I gathered those are needed to download the other packages, so I didn’t write down the names. If I recall correctly, Guile was in that list.) b. Invoked ‘guix build hello’ without network access. The command succeeded. No questions here. c. Called ‘guix prefetch emacs’. These packages were configured and built: pkg-config, libunistring, ncurses, libatomic_ops, patch, tar, xz, gzip, zlib, which, gc, perl, m4, readline, libffi, texinfo, libtool, gmp, libtasn1, nettle, guile, gnutls. Are these essential, or is there an error in ‘guix prefetch’? According to the build logs, the install prefix of gmp is ‘/gnu/store/hpaz49xz76p4qmpjc9r33hni1w781y66-gmp-5.1.3’, which doesn’t appear in the lists provided by ‘guix prefetch hello’ and ‘guix prefetch emacs’. I’m not sure why it’s the case. 2. I think it would be nice to output the location of a tarball after running ‘guix prefetch’, but I’m not sure how to get the relevant derivation. For ‘hello’, it’s neither (package-source-derivation store (package-source hello)) nor (package-derivation store hello) because the derivation listed in the initial output of ‘guix prefetch hello’ differs. Of course, it’s possible to filter the list produced by (build-derivations store (map (lambda (drv) ;; (format #t " ~a~%" (derivation-file-name drv)) (format #t " ~a~%" drv) drv) (derivations-to-prefetch store (package-derivation store package))))) But it’s error-prone, so I’d rather avoid that. 3. I’m planning to add ‘--dry-run’, which will simply print the list of needed derivations. What options would you like to see implemented?