Re: bug#26608: channels.scm supporting substitutes

[Nome Grey <greynome72@gmail.com>]

Hi simon, help-guix,

Thanks for taking the time to handle my email.  I'm trying to get guix
going and upgrading on my resource-starved system without doing much
compilation, using substitutes instead.

The intent of my email was to add on to ludo's example channels file at
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/26608#12 with changes that would let it
continue to work on more recent guix releases, which I'd shared at
https://github.com/nomr72/guix-substitutes-channel .

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, 1:14 PM zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> wrote:

> You sent your email to all 3 bugs: 26608@debbugs.gnu.org,
> 32022@debbugs.gnu.org, 22629@debbugs.gnu.org. It is not a good
> practise. Instead, it appears to me more appropriate to send to
> help-guix@gnu.org.
>

My intent was to help people finding the issue with google or who were
still following the bugs due to interest.  32022 was closed unimplemented.
Maybe including 22629 was an error; many of the relevant messages in 32022
and 26608 came from and were also sent to the 22629 thread, so I thought it
could be a path to find the topic from search engines, and I thought it
could be safe since it was closed.

I didn't know I would be bugging people unrelated to this topic -- is help
the right place for this?


> > Ludovic posted some channels.scm code in September 2018 supporting using
> more substitutes.
>
> Second, it will help to point exactly where Ludo posted what you are
> referencing to. Because 22629, 26608 and 32022 are big threads. :-)
>

Linked at top.  Sorry.

> Unfortunately his code no longer functions due to an upgrade of
> guile-json in guix.
>
> If you know more or less the date, you can find the commit. And *if*
> this commit is after the big 0.15 overhaul, you can 1. Guix checkout
> with "guix pull --commit=<hash>" then 2. Git checkout your guix clone
> to this commit and 3. use "guix environment guix" to spawn an shell
> with all the dependencies available. And the code you are referencing
> should work.
>

Unfortunately the code is for upgrading to the latest version of guix!  =)
Thank you though.  This might have helped a lot when I was bootstrapping.

> Maybe I can learn enough to upgrade it to check the 'guix-master'
> evaluations to find the latest build of key packages.  We'll see.
>
> Third, please describe what you are trying to achieve.
>

Here I am discussing trying to extend the channels.scm to handle an
arbitrary set of packages as ludo describes in
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/26608#14 .  The hope is to produce the
latest guix commit hash where a set of packages have been successfully
built, using the cuirass api.

I think I can pull it off with some confused searching of the guile manual
and cuirass source code, but I'm not sure if it will meet my goal of having
a snappy-to-upgrade substitutes-based foreign guix.

Thanks for reading, processing, doing your work, and being you =)

nomr