Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> That’s because the package version itself is insufficient.  In Guix
> we’re dealing with package “variants”.

Where is the concept of a package "variant" defined?  I briefly grepped
in the source but only found some ad-hoc stuff for Python and OCaml,
which actually do some kind of stuff with the package-properties.

> Guix will never upgrade a package to the same variant, but it can
> happen that there are different variants for the same version of a
> package.
>
> That’s usually because inputs to these packages have changed, which
> results in a new package output in the functional package management
> model.  The version stays the same, but since the inputs have changed,
> the output will be different and thus end up in a new directory.

How can the inputs have changed if Pierre is just running "guix package
-u" repeatedly?

-- 
Chris