Ok, thanks for clarification.
I

2017-12-03 0:29 GMT+01:00 Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>:

> On Sat, Dec 02, 2017 at 05:28:51PM +0100, Gábor Boskovits wrote:
> > Sometimes while working in guix I run into problems because:
> > 1. a tarball was removed or modified upstream
> >
> > It would be great to have the ability to install the latest release in
> all
> > the supported ways on all supported architectures, and have the ability
> do
> > guix pull without problems.
> > Last time I tried that it did not worked, because one of the upstream
> > linux-libre tarballs was removed. It would be nice if we could afford to
> > host the sources, so that at lesat a bare-bones guixsd suffered no such
> > problems.
>
> We actually do host the sources, but Guix usually tries fetching them
> from upstream first, which can be annoying. We are discussing this here:
>
> <https://bugs.gnu.org/28659>
>
> > 2. some packages take very long time to build (notably guile)
> >
> > It would be nice, if we could provide the substitutes that the current
> > core-updates gnu-build-system needs. That would make development that
> needs
> > to be done on core-updates much more pleasant to those who are working
> in a
> > restricted hardware environment.
>
> We use the core-updates branch like this:
>
> 1) For a couple months we just push changes to core packages to the
> branch without worrying about if it works or not.
> 2) After some time, we try building the branch and fix everything that
> is broken. Once that is done, we merge it into the master branch, which
> is what `guix pull` uses by default.
>
> So, for most of the life of a core-updates branch, it's likely that no
> packages will be buildable, and thus we don't even try, so there are no
> substitutes.
>
> Once we start building it, substitutes are available in the normal way.
>