Re: Having a Guix archive on the download page?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Pjotr,

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:

> Is it an idea to also have a current Guix archive on the download
> page? Or at least a link to one?
>
>    https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/download/
>
> Ever so often I need to rescue a running Guix system which won't run
> guix pull and even a build-from-source quickly. Being able to do
>
>    guix archive --import < guix-latest.nar
>
> or something similar would be rather convenient. 

FWIW, this is in essence what the new ‘guix pull’ attempts to do with
the help of substitutes.

Problems about missing dependencies leading to unusable ‘guix pull’
(lack of Guile-Git, Guile-SQLite3, etc.) should now be gone because
‘guix pull’ now pulls Guix *and* its dependencies, which was not the
case before.

Now the question is, will it always be possible to run ‘guix pull’ from
an arbitrary-old Guix?  Maybe it will still be impossible sometimes if
the old Guix is really too old.  However, I suspect such issues will be
much more rare.  There’s essentially a single file that needs to be put
under scrutiny to avoid such issues: build-aux/build-self.scm.

An archive like you suggest could be useful in those hopefully rare
cases where things break, so it’s a good idea.

Ludo’.