Guix 1.4.0+i686: getting ghc substitutes?

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1432 bytes --]

Hi,

In GNU Boot we use Guix 1.4.0 instead of the latest revision because
we can easily point to the 1.4.0 manual and we don't need to update our
code following Guix changes.

We also use i686 (--system=i686-linux) to enable to build GNU Boot on
all the computers we support.

Until now that worked fine but we then hit an issue that we cannot
solve on our own.

We also want to use Guix 1.4.0 + --system=i686-linux for building our
website as well and this requires pandoc, which in turn requires ghc.

However even if ghc builds fine for i686, it takes a very long time to
build (more than 1 night of compilation on a ThinkPad X200). Building
on a way faster computer (a KGPE-D16) doesn't make things much faster.

Part of the issue is because tests are very long to run, and another
part is that we have ghc -> ghc@8.6 -> ghc@8.4 -> ghc@8.0 -> ghc@7.

Disabling tests makes the build an order of magnitude faster, but we
still have multiple hours just for building ghc, so it's not good
enough just to get pandoc to build a website.

Would it be possible to somehow trigger a build on one of the default
substitute server to fix this issue?

If not we could simply change the Guix revision and somehow publish the
corresponding manual as well, but using a release probably makes
things much easier for contributors. Not using Guix by default for
building the website is also an option.

Denis.

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]