bug#53162: ’guix shell ghc@8.4’ downloads ghc@8.10

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 11:18, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Is it a problem that the latest GHC is used to build the package cache?
> (Apart from being surprising and suboptimal.)

Functionally, it appears to be not a blocking problem.  However,
suboptimal means concretely 110+ MB of additional download; well it just
doubles the size of the download.

About the surprise, if one is confident with their Guix skill, then they
look for a bug Guix-side; if one is less confident, then they look for a
twist in their config.  In both cases, it is a diversion – let as the
reader’s judgment if this diversion is fun or a waste of time. :-)


> Some profile hooks, such as ‘gdk-pixbuf-loaders-cache-file’, use the
> package available in the closure (gdk-pixbuf in this case) rather than
> the latest version.  It’s a bit of a hack, but if required, we could do
> that.

What other Haskellers think about the issue?  Fix or document this
surprising behaviour?


Cheers,
simon