Re: installing a mirror for offline installation

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Quiliro <quiliro@riseup.net> writes:

> El Fri, 26 May 2017 13:20:36 +0200
> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> escribió:
>
>>
>> Quiliro <quiliro@riseup.net> writes:
>>
>> > I finally could install bare-bones.scm GuixSD working machine. Now i
>> > am interested in installing a mirror [of hydra] for offline
>> > installation. There is no telecommunications where I live. So I could
>> > bring the server to download substitutes and then take it back to my
>> > network for local download. I was told that an nginx mirror of hydra
>> > would cache only substitutes after they have been requested through
>> > it.
>>
>> This is a little complicated.  We build software continuously with
>> Hydra, so what you want would only really work for one particular
>> version of Guix.
>>
>> Hydra provides binaries not only for a single version of Guix, so you
>> cannot just copy everything.  What you *can* do, however, is this:
>>
>> * provision a portable computer with lots of disk space
>
> Will 100GB be enough? 1TB?

Do you need *all* packages?  Note that it would only be for *one*
version of Guix, so you’d have to do this again if you want to update
the machines at some point.

>> * check out the version of Guix you plan to install elsewhere
>>
>> * build *every* package that you know you will need at the remote site.
>>   (This could be done by building a system configuration, for example.)
>
> I have no idea how to do this. I know how to install a group of
> packages to make a desktop for example. But is there a group where all
> packages are installed? Could there be a conflict where one package is
> not downloaded because it will conflict with another? (I know this is
> usually not the case in GuixSD but all cases have been considered?)

There will not be any conflicts.  You don’t install these packages into
a profile, you just add them to the store where every item has its own
directory.  Only when installing packages into a single profile there
can be file name conflicts.

Not all packages can actually be built.  There’s a small percentage of
packages that fails to build from source and you would probably waste a
lot of time trying to build them locally.  I don’t know if there’s an
easy way to exclude those packages and refuse to build anything locally
(maybe with a smart offloading setup).

It might be easier to just build a single complete system configuration,
export it (e.g. with “guix archive” or “guix copy”) and import it on the
other machine.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to repeatedly build and
copy store items over.

--
Ricardo

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