So, I stumbled a bit with a fairly recently installed aarch64/arm64
system. The install went fine late December, but then I tried "guix
system reconfigure" a couple days ago, and even though it is a very
simple configuration (based on bare-bones.tmpl with grub-efi)... it
pretty much needed to rebuild about 12 rust versions, as no substitutes
were available on aarch64-linux. *sigh*

I thought I tracked this down to guix-icons depending on librsvg, which
depends on rust... and guix-icons is in %base-packages.

So I dropped use of %base-packages-artwork, which pulls in guix-icons
and used all the various other %base-packages-* stuff explicitly... but
it still wanted to pull in guix-icons/librsvg/rust-* etc ... it just did
so later in the build process... foiled again!

This is because the default grub theme generates a .png from an .svg
... using guile-rsvg, which uses librsvg, which uses rust ...

But this machine just has a serial console, and has no need of a
background image in the grub configuration...

So eventually I figured out how to get a grub theme without a background
image and drop guix-icons from the configuration by avoiding use of
%base-packages-artwork:

   (bootloader (bootloader-configuration
+                (theme (grub-theme (image #f)))
                 (bootloader grub-efi-bootloader)
                 (targets '("/boot/efi"))))

-  (packages (cons screen %base-packages))
+  (packages (append (list screen nss-certs)
+          %base-packages-interactive
+          %base-packages-linux
+          %base-packages-networking
+          %base-packages-utils))

Maybe these is a more elegant way of doing this.


So, the example bare-bones system configuration does seems to have heavy
layers of rust obscuring the bones.

Do we want a really-quite-bare-bones configuration example?
Should guix-icons not actually be in %base-packages?
Can the grub theme be implemented differently without requiring rust?


This seems like possibly a discussion so far, but I would also be happy
to turn this into a bug report if desired!


Thanks everyone!


live well,
  vagrant