Re: guix pull only from private channel

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Tue, 15 Dec 2020 at 19:29, Phil <phil@beadling.co.uk> wrote:

> 1) If the private channel is a git repo accessed via ssh it seems
> necessary to add the ssh key to an ssh-agent rather than have it pick up
> ~/.ssh/id_rsa.  This isn't a huge problem but when the ssh key has no
> passphrase the use of an agent is actually more complicated than passing
> the key directly?  Is it possible to specify a key file, and if not, is
> there any good reason why not (I thought perhaps it might be access via
> the guix-daemon or similar at a wild guess)?

About this, I do not know.

> 2) Assuming I use an ssh-agent to avoid issue in 1), if I want to only
> pull updates from my private channel and not from the Guix channel, I
> find myself doing something like the below to force Guix channel to stay 
> constant:
>
> eval `ssh-agent` && ssh-add && guix pull --commit=$(guix describe -f
> json | jq -r '.[] | select(.name=="guix").commit') && guix upgrade 
> my-package-name
>
> This works, but it feels rather ugly - is there an easier way of saying
> "hold guix constant, but pull in latest updates from my private
> channel" - it feels like a common use-case to me?

About this, you should write a specific channels.scm file and then run:

  guix pull -C channels.scm

where the file is for example:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(use-modules
 (guix utils)
 (guix profiles)
 (guix channels)
 (guix openpgp))

(define guix (car %default-channels))
(define current (string-append (config-directory #:ensure? #f) "/current"))
(define channels (profile-channels current))
(define defaults (filter (lambda (channel)
                          (define (channel=? channel1 channel2)
                            (equal?
                             (channel-name channel1)
                             (channel-name channel2)))
                          (channel=? channel guix))
                        channels))

(append
 defaults
 (list
  (channel
  (name 'past)
  (url "https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-past.git";)
  (branch "master"))))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Obviously, this is a quick example and you could filter as you
want--here only with the channel name "guix".  And this file could be
in '~/.config/guix/channels.scm' and so "guix pull" would only pull
everything except the channel named 'guix' which stays constant.  Then
to update the current 'guix' channel, you could have another file, for
instance ~/.config/guix/default-channels.scm containing only one line
with "%default-channels" and so "guix pull -C
~/.config/guix/default-channels.scm" would only update the default
ones.

The point is: instead of this ugly command line with ugly filtering,
you should investigate in the Scheme API. :-)

Hope that helps,
simon