Guix home packages and garbage collection

Guix home packages and garbage collection

[Trev]

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Hey There,

I am not sure if I have some sort of bug, or if this is how guix home is
intended to work. The short problem that I am having is that every time
I do a guix gc, the next time I feel the need to do a guix home
reconfigure for some petty change such as an environment variable, guix
feels the need to download all of my packages and re-compile the
packages that are built from source.

I am feeling like garbage collection, or guix home are more trouble than
they're worth as I have to sit there for 30+ minutes just to see if some
small thing in my profile has changed.

Based on the wonderful help from the people in IRC I had thought:

1. It doesn't matter if I install using guix package or guix home, the
links to the relevant derivations should remain the same. Whether this
has any bearing on my "problem" remains to be seen.

2. Unless some package is needed for the "building", it should have
little bearing on the currently installed package state. This is to say,
guix home reconfigure should not re-download and build packages ad
nauseam just because guix gc cleared some build dependencies for
packages that are already installed and working.

3. Perhaps grafts have something to do with this, but I have done tests
in rapid succession to reproduce the problem. I think maybe grafts
haven't had a chance to be seen after a fresh guix pull prior to
replicating the problem.

Acting on some troubleshooting advice I had deleted my profiles for my
user, and garbage collected everything. I then ran a guix pull and and a
guix home reconfigure to restore my user from my current configuration
with a clean slate. There are no packages installed with guix package at
this point, and no guix package generations. The "problem" still
persists.

May I get some idea as to whether or not I have an actual problem with
guix home here or if this is the current intended side-effect of guix gc
with packages installed via guix home? This way I can migrate away from
guix home and leave that alone until it matures, or perhaps just opt
out.

Thank you for the amazing software!

-- 

Trev : 0FB7 D06B 4A2A F07E AD5B  1169 183B 6306 8AA1 D206

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Re: Guix home packages and garbage collection

[(]

I don't experience this issue personally, and I use `guix home` for all
my packages. Very strange.

    -- (

Re: Guix home packages and garbage collection

[Trev]

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"(" <paren@disroot.org> writes:

> I don't experience this issue personally, and I use `guix home` for all
> my packages. Very strange.
>
>     -- (

Thanks for helping confirm that I may have some sort of problem here. At
the risk of admitting that I depend on non-gnu stuff in order to make my
machine work, here's how I am set up. If I have made some sort of
blunder, I would love to know.

https://git.trevdev.ca/trevdev/guix-home-temp

-- 

Trev : 0FB7 D06B 4A2A F07E AD5B  1169 183B 6306 8AA1 D206

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Re: Guix home packages and garbage collection

[Trev]

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On second (or third...maybe fourth?) thought I have re-read the documentation for guix gc and it does state:

> Running guix gc with no arguments will collect
> as much garbage as it can, but that is often
> inconvenient: you may find yourself having to
> rebuild or re-download software that is “dead”
> from the GC viewpoint but that is necessary to
> build other pieces of software—e.g., the
> compiler tool chain. 

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-gc.html

This pulls me back into wondering if I am just misusing guix gc. This behavior would feel less problematic if I accepted that I should either gc far less frequently or use something like gnu stow for environment/config instead.


On June 27, 2022 11:11:01 a.m. PDT, Trev <trev@trevdev.ca> wrote:
>"(" <paren@disroot.org> writes:
>
>> I don't experience this issue personally, and I use `guix home` for all
>> my packages. Very strange.
>>
>>     -- (
>
>Thanks for helping confirm that I may have some sort of problem here. At
>the risk of admitting that I depend on non-gnu stuff in order to make my
>machine work, here's how I am set up. If I have made some sort of
>blunder, I would love to know.
>
>https://git.trevdev.ca/trevdev/guix-home-temp
>
>-- 
>
>Trev : 0FB7 D06B 4A2A F07E AD5B  1169 183B 6306 8AA1 D206

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