Re: Offloading builds asynchronously for use by low-powered machines (or: can you get a home config derivation without building its packages?)

["Jonathan Frederickson" <jonathan@terracrypt.net>]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2024, at 9:33 AM, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> I have a pinebook pro and I also have a couple of other aarch64
> machines, and here's what I do:
> 
> `guix pull` on my pinebook pro, `guix home build --no-grafts ... -d` and
> `guix system build --no-grafts -d` to get the derivations
> 
> Then I'll do `guix copy --to=my-x86_64-machine /gnu/store/...-drv` of
> the two derivations
> 
> Then from there I'll build them since I already have offloading setup.
> 
> I'll either get substitutes from my main machine, or from there I'll do
> `guix copy --to=pinebookpro $(guix build /gnu/store/...-drv)`, and
> that'll automatically copy the packages to my pinebook pro once it's
> finished building everything.

Oh thanks this was very helpful! I just went and tried running `guix build --no-grafts -d` and it behaved as I expected it to before, returning only the derivation path without building it. I hadn't used  `--no-grafts` previously, and that seems to be the crucial difference for this workflow; `guix build -d` without `--no-grafts` seems to attempt a build of (some/all of?) the packages in the derivation.