From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=)
Subject: Re: Having a Guix archive on the download page?
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2018 14:55:45 +0200
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References: <20180707121712.7mduwpoesyyeucqj@thebird.nl>
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In-Reply-To: <20180707121712.7mduwpoesyyeucqj@thebird.nl> (Pjotr Prins's
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To: Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>
Cc: guix-devel <guix-devel@gnu.org>

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.=20

FWIW, this is in essence what the new =E2=80=98guix pull=E2=80=99 attempts =
to do with
the help of substitutes.

Problems about missing dependencies leading to unusable =E2=80=98guix pull=
=E2=80=99
(lack of Guile-Git, Guile-SQLite3, etc.) should now be gone because
=E2=80=98guix pull=E2=80=99 now pulls Guix *and* its dependencies, which wa=
s not the
case before.

Now the question is, will it always be possible to run =E2=80=98guix pull=
=E2=80=99 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=E2=80=99s 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=E2=80=99s a good idea.

Ludo=E2=80=99.