Re: Override source uri of older version of a package?

[Ludovic Courtès]

"RW. S" <address@hidden> skribis:

> So I added nss-certs to packages, then I ran guix system reconfigure.
> But guix system reconfigure could not finish because it got stuck on a
> download which doesn't exist anymore. Specifically, it got stuck at
> downloading nss-3.19.2 via ftp from the following uri:
>
> ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/security/nss/releases/NSS_3_19_2_RTM/src/nss-3.19.2.tar.gz
>
> And the reason is mozilla has decommissioned their ftp (for this or
> whatever): https://bugzil.la/1250774

Right.  Current ‘master’ uses HTTPS for Mozilla software.

> Now, if you use https:// protocol instead (so just the change the
> ftp:// at the start of that uri with https://), it works and I used
> guix download to confirm the resulting tarball has the same hash, at
> least for this package.
>
> So the question is, is it possible to change the source uri of an
> older package? I know I can create a new package object to override
> the one that guix has, but I don't want to do that, I want to keep
> everything the same, except *if something does need the older
> nss-3.19.2*, then it uses the working https:// source instead of the
> now not-working ftp:// one. (Note the latest nss is version 3.21, so I
> want to keep it like that.)

To work around the problem you had, you can always manually run:

  guix download https://…/nss-3.19.2.tar.gz

After that, you can run ‘guix system reconfigure’ and it will proceed
happily (namely, it will notice that the tarball is already in
/gnu/store so it won’t try to redownload it.)

Apart from this trick, there’s also the possibility that hydra.gnu.org
has a substitute for the tarball, in which case you’ll get it from
there.

Last, ‘guix build’ and ‘guix package’ have a --with-source command-line
option that could be used.  ‘guix system’ doesn’t support it, though.

HTH,
Ludo’.