#26608 - Provide --only-substitutes flag to "guix package --upgrade"

Package	Source(s)		Maintainer(s)
guix		PTS Buildd Popcon

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From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
To: Alex Sassmannshausen <alex@pompo.co>
Subject: Re: bug#22629: “Stable” branch
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Hi Alex,

Alex Sassmannshausen <alex@pompo.co> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès writes:

[...]

>> I just had a bright idea (yes!): this can be addressed by writing
>> something like this in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm:
>>
>>   (map latest-commit-with-substitutes-available
>>        %default-channels)
>>
>> The hypothetical ‘latest-commit-with-substitutes-available’ would use
>> (git) and (guix ci) to find the latest commit for which substitutes of
>> interest are available, and would return:
>>
>>   (channel
>>     ;; …
>>     (commit "cabbag3"))   ;the ideal commit
>
> This sounds incredibly interesting — and it is testament once again to
> the power of Guix that this kind of solution could be feasible!

Just to be clear: I don’t think this would be a substitute for a
“stable” branch; rather, I view as a way to have user-defined policies
such as “pull up to the latest commit for which there’s a substitute for
IceCat.”

> Thinking this through in my head somewhat, I had the following thoughts:
> - This procedure is invoked client side, where the channel is defined
> - That means the git searching is done client side, on every invocation
> of guix (I guess this might be cacheable?)

On every invocation of ‘guix pull’ only.

> I have no idea what the performance cost would be.  I guess you would
> use "guix weather" to turn the set of requested packages into a manifest
> which can then be checked with it.

As I imagine it, the cost would be a few HTTP queries to the Cuirass
API.  I should try to come up with an example to better explain what I
had in mind!

> The question of security updates is tricky at the moment already — I
> would hazard a guess that many people bail out of upgrading when they
> can't get substitutes for their entire profile / system right now, which
> means they are not getting security upgrades for package (a) when a
> substitute for (b) fails.

That’s probably true, and I agree it’s problematic.

What I typically do is “guix pull && guix package -n -u”.  Then I look
at things that would be built; if, say, LibreOffice is among them, I
wait for a little while and try again later, until I can get enough
substitutes.  That usually works okay, but it fails if it turns out that
one of the dependencies fails to build: substitutes never become
available in that case.

Ludo’.

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#26608 Provide --only-substitutes flag to "guix package --upgrade"