Re: Upgrading packages with substitutes only (bug #26608)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Timothy,

Timothy Sample <address@hidden> skribis:

> I’ve been using GuixSD for a couple of months now, and it is super
> cool. Thanks for all your hard work! There is one little thing,
> though. :)

If it’s just this one thing, that’s okay.  ;-)

> Ludo suggested to check each package using the “substitute-paths” RPC
> and filter them accordingly. I did exactly this, but there was a
> problem. Packages were being built before my code even ran! It turns out
> that calling “package-output” (or “package-derivation”) to get a
> package’s output path may result in building the package. It’s the
> grafting code that does this − it needs to get a package’s references,
> and if the daemon gives it any trouble, it tells the daemon to just
> build the package to figure it out. This is a real problem if you are
> trying to avoid building. This all happens pretty early when running
> “guix package -u”, since it compares output paths when figuring out what
> needs upgrading.

Indeed, I hadn’t thought of this “little detail”!

> Therefore, to make it work, I introduced a flag, “#:fail-on-build?”,
> that I threaded through a few functions that lets me try to get a
> package’s output path without resorting to building the package. The
> change looks like this:

I would probably take a different route: we could check for the
substitutes of the ungrafted packages (hydra.gnu.org does not provide
substitutes for the grafted packages anyway) and decide based on that.

How does that sound?  I haven’t checked the code, let me know if there’s
something else I’m missing.

BTW, should --only-substitutes filter out packages without a substitute,
or should it simply stop and report the list of missing substitutes
(after which the user could use --do-not-upgrade)?

> If adding this extra parameter isn’t too ugly, then I will put together
> two patches: one with this parameter, and another that uses it to
> implement “--only-substitutes”. (And maybe a third that fixes a very
> minor bug in “guix package”, but that’s another story.) I’m new to
> Scheme programming, so this may be an atrocity of some sort that I just
> don’t know about; go easy! :)

Well that’s a very nice dive into this code base in a foreign language.
:-)

Thank you!

Ludo’.