Re: Some newbie questions

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 6:08 AM, Jan Synáček <jan.synacek@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been playing with guix a bit and I must say I really like it. I don't
> understand a few things though.
>
> 1) How do I tell if a package I have installed had been built locally or
> downloaded as a substitute?

You don't.  You can think of substitution is an optimization
technique, the results are indistinguishable except for that it likely
took less time to get the substitute.  It's possible to query the
substitute server to see if it has the store item that you have, but
that doesn't mean that your copy was retrieved from there necessarily.
Other than that, the Guix tools will tell you at build/download time
whether or not it is building from source or downloading a pre-built
binary.  What use-case do you have in mind?

> 2) There are a lot of packages with executable binaries in the bin/
> subfolder in /gnu/store. However, if I didn't explicitly install the
> package, I don't have it in my profile and can't easily reach the binary
> without first looking it up in the store. Do I have to always "install" a
> package to be able to use run it easily?

Not always, but usually that is what you'd do.  This is how we achieve
isolation of environments.  Different users, or the same user in
different circumstances, will want different sets of programs and
libraries available to them.

That said, if you just want to do a one-off run of something, you can
use 'guix environment' instead, which will not install anything to
your user profile, like so:

    guix environment --ad-hoc wget -- wget http://gnu.org/s/guix

> Please, excuse my not-so-clear questions, I still don't fully understand how
> things really work in guix.

No problem at all.  Welcome!

- Dave