Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> That sounds like a good idea.  ‘guix develop’ could keep the profiles it
> manages under ~/.cache/guix.
>
> Now, this would be very much stateful: you can’t tell in advance whether
> you’re going to build a new profile based on the current Guix, or
> whether you’re going to reuse a previously cached profile that could be
> arbitrarily old.  That doesn’t sound great.

This could be fixed, maybe the following way:

- Dump the channel specifications for every profile in
  etc/channel-spec.scm for instance.

- Merge Konrad's time-machine script so that we can easily reuse a
  channel specification to activate a profile.

> Perhaps we should focus on improving the performance of ‘guix
> environment’ first and foremost?

But isn't it orthogonal to this issue?

As I understand it, the current discussion is about "pinning"
profiles.
Should any dependency get garbage collected, an environment will need
Internet access to refetch the missing parts; I think this is what we
are trying to avoid, regardless of how fast `guix environment` is.


What about `guix environment --pin` instead of `guix develop`?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/