Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> writes:
>
>>> - There may be too many provenances, we need to add a CLI flag to
>>>   ignore provenance.
>>
>> Too many in what sense?
>>
>> I'd just print a warning if the specification refers to more than, say,
>> five inferiors. Users can then clean up their profile or live with the
>> mess.
>>
>> Cleaning up just means updating the profile.
>
> You mean with
>
> guix upgrade -p /path/to/profile?
>
>> That would re-create
>> specifications.scm, in a better way than a special CLI flag because
>> specifications.scm is always the same as the current profile.
>
> OK, but what about a system where you don't have the profile, only the
> specification file?
>
> I believe we still need a flag to override the channels, basically add
> -C,--channels to `guix package`.

After a discussion with Zimoun, -C would break the guarantee that =guix
package= is using the current Guix, plus would overlap with =guix
time-machine=.

Instead, I suggest we use a --use-default-channels boolean flag and then we
could leverage guix time-machine to force a specific channel
specification on a manifest:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
guix time-machine --channels=foo.scm -- package -m specs.scm --use-default-channels
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/