Re: “Guix Profiles in Practice”

[Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au>]

Hey Pierre,

On Mon, Nov 04 2019, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> 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`?

Have you used `guix environment --root`?

In my git checkout of the Guix repository I once ran `guix 
environment guix --root=.environment`, and now whenever I want to 
hack on Guix I start a shell and `source 
.environment/etc/profile`. The .environment symlink is treated as 
a GC root by Guix, and because I'm not actually invoking Guix 
there's never a risk that it will attempt to fetch anything from 
the internet.

Upgrading the environment is quite easy, and must be done 
manually: I delete the existing symlink and run `guix environment 
guix --root=.environment` again. If I'm feeling paranoid I'll run 
`guix environment guix` once first to make sure it succeeds, 
before deleting the old symlink and adding the 
`--root=.environment` to the end.

Carlo