Re: GuixSD installation: binary vs source packages

[myglc2 <myglc2@gmail.com>]

On 02/25/2017 at 10:52 Leo Famulari writes:

> On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 09:01:39PM -0500, myglc2 wrote:
>> In my practical experience of running a GuixSD headless server for the
>> last 12 months, if you use 'guix pull', which is effectively a rolling
>> release, there is no way to tell.
>
> The default action of `guix pull` is like a rolling release, but you can
> also use it to deploy any version or Git commit of Guix, using `guix
> pull --url=...`:
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=8a9cffb202414b20081910115ba76402924bdcdd
>
> You still can't be sure that we will have binary substitutes for every
> package. I just wanted to point out this little-known feature of `guix
> pull`, which gives Guix users some more flexibility without requiring
> them to maintain a Guix development environment.

Thanks. I think the issue with this feature is that there is no guidance
for picking an URL.

Here is an idea... What if hydra provided an URL guidance page?  For
example, it could have a short list of "guix greatest hits URLs" for
which, hopefully, a full set of substitutes is maintained. Obvious
candidates for this list would be the last couple install images. Or, it
could provide a page ranking URLs by release date and showing substitute
coverage.