From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Leo Famulari Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc: Mention "guix pull" during installation. Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:38:56 -0500 Message-ID: <20161217173856.GA30440@jasmine> References: <82b3233597949c866c26628054117ee3@mykolab.ch> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:51656) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cIIwp-0006Qa-VS for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:39:05 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cIIwk-0000r4-US for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:39:03 -0500 Received: from out1-smtp.messagingengine.com ([66.111.4.25]:35769) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1cIIwk-0000qm-DY for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:38:58 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <82b3233597949c866c26628054117ee3@mykolab.ch> 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" To: Petter Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 09:38:02AM +0100, Petter wrote: > good experience because of this. Proposing a patch to add this to the > manual. Thanks for looking out for the new user experience, which one tends to forget as time passes :) > * doc/guix.texi (Proceeding with the Installation): Add "guix pull". > +At this point it is advisable to update the system, especially if the > +installer is more than a few weeks old. Then most, if not all, packages > +will be available as substitutes. > + > +@example > +guix pull > +@end example So far, in practice, this seems to become necessary as a given release grows old. This is a negative side effect of some limitations of our build farm infrastructure. Specifically, we start to garbage collect the substitutes that correspond to a release as time goes by, for two reasons: we need the disk space, and more importantly, our method of registering garbage collector roots [0] is still rather crude. Some of us are working on a different method of registering garbage collector roots that will allow us to tell Hydra, "Keep the substitutes for release X", or "Keep the substitutes for the master branch in the last 3 months". I've recently gave an explanation of why I think using `guix pull` before installing GuixSD should not be recommended unconditionally: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2016-11/msg00047.html In the specific case of installing GuixSD 0.11.0 today, `guix pull` is necessary, because we lack the substitutes, and some packages can't be built at all now [1]. But, adding these lines to the manual now won't make it show up in the 0.11.0 installer manual. I think we should work on improving our infrastructure in the next release cycle, and revisit this change to the manual if we are still having problems before the 0.13.0 release. What does everyone think? [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-gc.html [1] For example: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=d404a6f9711c8dcc1cc6cf55d8c07901aa450192