From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Thompson, David" Subject: Re: Some newbie questions Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 09:23:53 -0400 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:39726) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZrnBL-0004Ea-OX for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 29 Oct 2015 09:24:01 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZrnBK-0000BQ-QF for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 29 Oct 2015 09:23:55 -0400 Received: from mail-yk0-x22f.google.com ([2607:f8b0:4002:c07::22f]:33656) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZrnBK-0000BJ-L4 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 29 Oct 2015 09:23:54 -0400 Received: by ykft191 with SMTP id t191so41769418ykf.0 for ; Thu, 29 Oct 2015 06:23:54 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: =?UTF-8?B?SmFuIFN5bsOhxI1law==?= Cc: guix-devel On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 6:08 AM, Jan Syn=C3=A1=C4=8Dek 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