Re: Some newbie questions

[Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: TEXT/PLAIN, Size: 1910 bytes --]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015, Jan Synáček wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Thompson, David <dthompson2@worcester.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
>
> Nothing really specific. I was just curious if it was possible. Now that I
> think about it,
> I should get the same result whether building myself or installing a
> substitute,
> right?


Right. Thats what is going on here - binary same.


> I'm curious about one more thing. In /gnu/store/, there are built packages,
> which I understand.
> Then there are derivations, -builder files, standalone statically linked
> binaries, some patches
> and also some scheme files. There's also the .links directory that contains
> various file formats
> as well, only this time their names are only hashes. Does any
> documentation/source
> of information about what all those are exist? I couldn't find anything.
> The .links directory takes
> over 2GiB on my machine and I wonder why.


No idea. :)


> Cheers,
> -- 
> Jan Synáček


Adam Pribyl