Hi,

On Thu, 01 Nov 2018 05:02:24 +0100
brettg@posteo.net wrote:

> Hi all, I am trying to duplicate my environment on another machine of 
> mine using my plain desktop comfiguration.
> 
> There seems to be a bad URL request with telepathy
> On the gnome desktop service which is preventing the
> guix init system from grafting all of the packages.
> 
> It’s telepathy-glib-duplicates-tests 504ing on the hydra morror
> Even though I am substituting berlin.
> 
> And the relevant nixos tarball is 404ing.

Sorry, it seams there are still problems with the substitute servers.

You could try to just use berlin, like in:

guix system init --substitute-urls="https://berlin.guixsd.org"

But it might be the case that Berlin doesn't have the substitutes (yet)?

You get the 404 on nix tarballs because guix is falling back to
building from source. And then the original source package is no longer
existing on the project's side (i.e. they delete the old version,
changed the URL, etc). So guix is searching by hashsum on substitute
servers and Nix servers, but fails in your case also.

If you like, you can check which specific package it is and send a bug
or even patch for updating it in Guix. But that is more for the longer
run.

Are your computers on the same network? One solution for you could be to
use your old computer as substitute server, through guix publish:

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/guix.html#Invoking-guix-publish

Basically, you say on your old coputer `guix publish` and that will
serve substitutes on port 8080 (see manual to change port).

Then on your new one you can say

guix system init --substitute-urls="http://old-computers-ip:8080/"

(Maybe add berlin also, space-separated)

There are two things to look out for:

1) You need to register the key of your serving old computer into the
new computer, see docs in guix archive:

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/guix.html#Invoking-guix-archive

2) Your new computer should be on the same guix commit as on the old
one, at the time when you lastly did a `guix init reconfigure`,
such that it really fetches the same packages.

If you haven't done a guix pull on the old one, just run a 

old$ guix --version

and save the commit.

Then do a 

new$ guix pull --commit=<commit-id>

on the new one to bring them in sync.

Hope this helps,

Björn