Re: successful installation, but problems updating

[Thomas Sigurdsen]

Hello, sadly I can't help with the guix pull error, don't know a lot
about it unfortunately. I do have some comments on the other questions.

On Mon, 06 Nov 2017 09:16:56 +0100
Marco van Hulten <address@hidden> wrote:

> After this I should execute this command.
> 
> > $ guix system reconfigure
> > guix system: error: wrong number of arguments for action 'reconfigure'  
>

reconfigure (and some (maybe all?) of the other system commands) require a
config file. So 'guix system reconfigure /path/to/config.scm' should work.

> 
> I expected this not to work properly anyway because 'guix pull' did not
> succeed, but this seems like a syntax error that would have come up
> also after a correct 'guix pull' (except, of course, if 'guix pull'
> would provide files that account for the right number of arguments —
> but I don't understand Guix well enough to make any good presumptions
> about it).
> 
> 
> Finally, have two more general questions (possibly related) about
> Guix.
> 
> Firstly, it often says that I need to use '--fallback'.  Is that
> because the binary is not available?
>

'--fallback' means that guix will fall back to compiling from source if
it can't download binaries (also called substitutes). By default guix
tries to download substitutes from the build farm (hydra).

> 
> Secondly, I noted that with, e.g., 'guix package -i kodi' software gets
> compiled.  I understood that GNU Guix is capable of both binary and
> source packages.  Which should I typically expect?  Can I choose?
> 

It seems to me I usually get core and common packages as substitutes
(binaries). There is the ‘--no-substitutes’ command line flag to disable
substitutes and always build from source. I can't see a flag for
disabling source builds.

You'll find this information in the guix info pages, specifically under
"common build options" and "invoking guix system".

> -Marco

Thomas