Re: successful installation, but problems updating

[Carlo Zancanaro]

Hello!

On Mon, Nov 06 2017, Marco van Hulten wrote:
> I installed GuixSD 0.13.0 with success!

Excellent! That's great to hear!

> 'guix pull' ends with a compilation error:
>
>> guix pull: error: build failed: build of
>> `/gnu/store/*-guix-latest.drv' failed

This isn't enough to tell me what's happened, unfortunately. I'm not
sure what the common failure cases are for this, but hopefully someone
else will know.

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

The reconfigure command requires you to pass it a configuration file
(ie. config.scm). You can see the details in the manual[1].

> 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?

I'm not sure the exact circumstances for when this is necessary, but it
is when there is some sort of a problem with the binary substitutes. The
manual[2] describes it as "When substituting a pre-built binary fails,
fall back to building packages locally."

> 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?

This depends on a few factors, but most particularly how up-to-date the
build farms are. I'm not sure what you should expect most of the time,
but I usually expect that I'll have to build at least something during
my installations.

You can use the "--no-substitutes" flag for most commands (which you can
read about in the manual[2]) if you'd like to build everything locally.

Carlo

[1]: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-system.html
[2]: 
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Common-Build-Options.html

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