Re: How to include Guix 0.8 in Guix 0.8

[Ludovic Courtès]

address@hidden skribis:

> At present, every version of Guix always contains an older version of
> itself.  We needed a post-0.7 version of Guix to create a USB installer
> that contains Guix-0.7, but unfortunately it installs an older version
> of Guix on the hard drive.  If you then use the version of Guix on the
> hard drive to run "guix package -i guix" or "guix system reconfigure",
> you'll get a still older version of Guix, and so on.

I’ve been thinking about it, and yeah, basically it you run a series of
‘guix system reconfigure’ commands, without running ‘guix pull’, the
Guix version would keep going backwards in time.

I think neither hash rewriting, nor running ‘make dist’ and install time
are practical.  (The latter means that users would be required to
install the autotools and other things like Graphviz and Texinfo just to
be able to do that final step.)

However, ‘guix system reconfigure’ could at least detect whether the
Guix version number would be decreasing, and in that case just keep the
already installed version.  WDYT?

Of course, users would really need to run ‘guix pull’ once in a while,
so they can upgrade Guix.  Otherwise they’d just keep using the same
version.

Thanks,
Ludo’.