Re: Why does `system reconfigure` need to `pull`?

[Ian Eure]

Hi 45mg,

45mg <45mg.writes@gmail.com> writes:

> Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at
> 'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'...
>
> It then says it's fetching and indexing objects, authenticating 
> N
> new commits, etc. As far as I can tell, this stage is equivalent 
> to
> `guix pull`. It sometimes repeats this several times during the
> course of the `reconfigure`.
>
> I didn't think much of this at first, although I thought it was 
> odd
> that the manual did not mention a 'pull' stage [1].

I’ve also noticed this, and wondered why it always pulls 
first. Even
if you have an internet connection, the pull makes the reconfigure
slower than it could be.

> Now, I really want to believe that there's a way around this; 
> that I
> haven't read the docs enough, and there's some option or command 
> to
> reconfigure my system without pulling new commits. But I can't 
> seem
> to find any such thing. (`guix time-machine` has the same 
> problem
> [3].)
>
> Is there really no way to reconfigure my system without an 
> internet
> connection?

I dug around in the --help output, but I didn’t see anything that
looked like it’d skip the pull.  It’d definitely be nice to have 
an
--offline or --no-pull option when reconfiguring.

The simplest path forward for you is to replace your Guix channels
with local clones of them, so `guix pull' uses your filesystem 
instead
of the network.  You can then `git pull' in your clone to get new
commits when you like, and `guix pull' after that to update Guix 
to
use them.

I’ve heard of Guix getting used in places without much 
connectivity
before, though I don’t know how it was accomplished. Maybe someone 
can
chime in with their workflow.

-- Ian