Re: Seeking guidance regarding system roll-back and switch-generation

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> skribis:

> On 2016-07-17 11:22, Chris Marusich wrote:
>> However, it may not be necessary to generate a
>> "switch-to-configuration"
>> script at all.  Instead, what if we just stored the operating system
>> configuration file in a well known location within each system
>> generation?
>
> NixOS offers this option. I've forgot the name, because its utility is
> so limited, and its main use is to confuse people on IRC.
>
> All it does is copy /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to the store. That's
> it. All your imports are now broken, if they pointed to a relative path
> that doesn't exist in the store, or impure, if they pointed to an
> absolute
> path that wasn't immutable. This breaks all but the most trivial (or
> unmaintainable) set-ups. Even the NixOS installer creates a multi-file
> configuration by default.

I was about to make the same comment.  To put it differently, the
configuration.{scm,nix} file is not self-contained; its semantics are
determined by the rest of Guix/Nix{pkgs,OS}.  As such, it’s not very
helpful to keep it alone.

Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.