Re: A few questions about channels

[david . larsson]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2019, ison wrote:

> Several questions about channels have been on my mind which I haven't been able 
> to find any documentation on. So I figured I would ask them all in one place 
> since they seem like fairly standard questions that could help others setting 
> up channels in the future as well.
>
> 1) Is it possible to make a channel from a local git repository? (That is to 
> say, a directory on the local machine initialized as a git repository)

Yes, for example, cat ~/.config/guix/channels.scm

(cons (channel
       (name 'my-personal-packages)
       (url "file:///home/myuser/src/my-guix-packages"))
      %default-channels)

where the my-guix-packages directory is a git repo which has committed 
packageModN.scm files.

> 2) Is it possible to use private remote repositories as channels? The issue here seems to 
> be one of authentication. I'm wonder if there is (or should be) an 
> "authentication" field one would add to the channel definition in the 
> channels.scm file.
I agree it would be nice to have. The git-fetch method is defined here: 
https://github.com/guix-mirror/guix/blob/012bf5c4c03e30633f137960bd0677e204c638a7/guix/build/git.scm
 and I think it can be modified without too much effort to include an argument 
for the -key flag to the git command. I am not sure though whether git-fetch 
will have access to the home user's directory in case you provide let's say 
~/.ssh/id_rsa as argument. Another possibility would be to check the 
GIT_SSH_COMMAND env variable. I suppose you also need to make sure ssh is 
available for git-fetch.

--
Vänliga hälsningar / Best Regards
David L