I've been reading https://tazj.in/blog/trying-guix.
I also went in a #guix sidequest last year, and found a solution to
untangle Guix from the Guix pull modules. I realize I never documented
that publicly. Here we go
There's this popular workflow in the Nix space: using a local git
Nixpkgs checkout to override your system Nixpkgs. This is super useful
when hacking on NixOS modules, you can iteratively load them to your
desktop/servers. It also pretty useful when you quickly want to apply
a patch that is not merged upstream yet.
On Guix, this is a bit tricky to do. By default, Guix itself is tying
your system config with the different channels (guix, nonguix). The
trick is to leverage the pre-inst-env script to load the local guix
checkout. I did that through a small wrapper script I run when I want
to run guix system reconfigure.
See
https://codeberg.org/picnoir/guix-config/src/branch/master/home/bin/guix-rebuild-all#L5.
This works great, however, this will rewrite the guile load path, and
using this, you won't be able to use your extra channels (like
nonguix).
To work around that, the trick is to wrap your channels in a inferior
(see
https://codeberg.org/picnoir/guix-config/src/branch/master/systems/framework.scm#L29)
and combine them with the guix channel itself (loaded from your local
checkout).
Then use the lookup-inferior-packages function to retrieve packages
from this inferior
https://codeberg.org/picnoir/guix-config/src/branch/master/systems/framework.scm#L81.
Doing this makes hacking on Guix as I hack on NixOS. I can cherry pick
patches, apply them in my guix setup and transparently deploy them on
my host system if I need to.
There's an extra accidental benefit: incremental compilation. Since
we're evaluating Guix on a long-living repository, we don't have to
rebuild the channel from scratch on each pull. There's a caveat
though: incremental recompilation is somewhat buggy, I had to manually
clean the compiled files a couple of times. The error message was
super puzzling, took me a while to figure that out.
Kudos goes to cbaines, he helped me figuring out the inferior part of
this setup!
futurile
boosted
