Re: Install `guix pull'ed Guix to target partition on system install

[zimoun]

Hi Pierre,

On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 20:39, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> wrote:

> On a related topic, if 2 users "guix pull", is the whole checkout cloned
> twice?

>From my understanding yes, as I explained before.

Well, I have never timed when installing in a WM a complete Guix System
with the installer.  So I did with Xfce selected; it downloads some
pieces, and it took me around 40 minutes with my connection at less than
2Mbits/s, from selecting language to the reboot.  Then I boot the
installed VM image, open a terminal with the regular user and hit “guix
pull”.  The clone part is fast, couple of minutes, but then it downloads
a lot of substitutes and computes derivations.  This first “guix pull”
as regular user takes 20 minutes on my machine, mainly downloading
substitutes.

However, from my understanding, it is unavoidable because I used the
v1.2 image installer, therefore somehow, I fetched all the substitutes
from v1.2, then this first “guix pull” as user fetched the substitutes
corresponding to origin/master.  But you did not do that and instead
did:

        - guix pull -C my-channels.scm
        - guix system init ... /mnt 
        - reboot

Did you use Tor or something?  And what does “guix describe” as root
say?

Note that the first “guix pull” for another user (right after) takes
only 6 minutes, mainly cloning the repo.  Basically, on this first “guix
pull” for another user, the cloning+authenticating takes on my machine
~5 minutes.

This part could be improved but it is done only once, take less than 5
minutes with less than 2Mbits/s, so currently I am not convinced that it
is really the bottleneck when pulling the first time from a release
image.  Well, it is for sure an issue with low-bandwith network but Guix
is hard to use with low-material though and cloning is maybe the fastest
part. ;-)


Cheers,
simon