Hola,

> However, the hack doesn’t work for things like the ‘packages’ field of
> <operating-system> because it’s not a thunked field.

I see! Thanks for explaining.

>
> Two simple solutions here, I think:
>
>   1. Make ‘packages’ a thunked field.
>
>   2. Stop using ‘canonical-package’ altogether in ‘%base-packages’.
>
> I actually have a preference for #2.  We’d need to check what impact it
> has on the system closure size, but I suspect it’s going to be minimal.
>
> Thoughts?

Option #2 seems nicer. There are other canonical-package calls when
building services. I have a patch attached that removes all those calls.

The image produced when running "guix system disk-image bare-bones.tmpl"
increases by:

* 30MB when removing the canonical-package of %base-packages
* 30MB for all other calls.

So altogether, that's a 60MB increase on a 1.5GB image (4%). I find it
acceptable, WDYT?

Thanks,

Mathieu