bug#57315: guix upgrade --dry-run output is basically useless

[bdju]

On Sun Aug 21, 2022 at 1:39 AM CDT, Csepp wrote:
> This should go without saying, but this is pretty bad UX.
>
> Is there something that can be done about this?  The upgrade process on
> less powerful machines is pretty awful currently.
Agreed. Upgrading on Guix can be pretty horrible. Especially when you
find out you're seemingly the only user of certain packages so you hit a
bunch of build failures that you would've expected to be found and fixed
already, and you have to skip and/or report them and redo the upgrades
repeatedly. On most distros I would upgrade daily without worry, but
with Guix System I end up putting it off a week or two and trying to
plan out a time when I don't mind my CPU being maxed out entirely with
builds and such.

> Side note: I plan to work on a patch that adds an option to upgrade that
> keeps everything that would require local building at its previous
> version.  Hopefully I won't need to use the --do-not-upgrade option
> after that.  Right now upgrading is a multi-hour manual process, which
> honestly sucks.  With that patch it would still take a while but at
> least it would run automatically.

This sounds like a nice feature. I've wished for the ability to use guix
manifests but skip certain packages when there are issues, but if I
could use manifests along with an option like this, that'd accomplish
what I wanted anyway in most cases.