How is guix update and system upgrade supposed to work?

How is guix update and system upgrade supposed to work?

[Hartmut Goebel]

Hi,

I still did not understand how a system-wide guix and package update is
supposed to work. The manual is a bit terse on this.

On a Debian system root does "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" and all
packages are current.

Now on guix, if root runs "guix pull", roots I get a new version of
guix, containing the new package definitions. If root now runs "guix
package -u guix", this new version will go into root's profile and will
be available as /usr/local/bin/guix (as recommended by the manual, I
linked /usr/local/bin/guix to
/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix).

But otehr users still have different versions:

# guix --version
guix (GNU Guix) 20161108.22
# guix package -A python-tempest-lib
python-tempest-lib      1.0.0   out     gnu/packages/openstack.scm:320:2
 # which guix
/usr/local/bin/guix

$ guix --version
guix (GNU Guix) 0.11.0
$ guix package -A python-tempest-lib
python-tempest-lib      0.12.0  out     gnu/packages/openstack.scm:306:2
$ which guix
/usr/local/bin/guix
$ ls -l $(which guix)
… /usr/local/bin/guix ->
/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile/bin/guix
$ ls ~/.config/guix/
$

I understand, that guix looks for ~/.config/guix/latest. But
nevertheless I would expect some way to update guix for all users How is
this supposed to work?

Any since I do not even manage to update guix, how doe I update all
system binaries? (I know, this will not update the binaries a user has
installed for him/herself).

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |

Re: How is guix update and system upgrade supposed to work?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> skribis:

> I still did not understand how a system-wide guix and package update is
> supposed to work. The manual is a bit terse on this.
>
> On a Debian system root does "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" and all
> packages are current.

The Guix equivalent is “guix pull && guix package -u”.

However, as you note, this is per-user here: it only upgrades packages
of the profile of the user that runs it.

This is a deliberate choice: we want users to be able to manage their
own package set by themselves.  Thus…

> I understand, that guix looks for ~/.config/guix/latest. But
> nevertheless I would expect some way to update guix for all users How is
> this supposed to work?

… upgrading packages of all users is not a central use case.  :-)

You *could* force each user’s ~/.config/guix/latest symlink to point to,
say, ~root/.config/guix/latest, and have a policy that only root runs
“guix pull”.  That way, all the users would be using the same Guix.

But users would still be able to bypass it, and that’s the whole point
of Guix anyway.

> Any since I do not even manage to update guix, how doe I update all
> system binaries? (I know, this will not update the binaries a user has
> installed for him/herself).

What do you mean by “system binaries”?  On GuixSD, system-wide binaries
(which are under /run/current-system/profile/) are upgraded by:

  # guix pull && guix system reconfigure config.scm

HTH!

Ludo’.