Re: Identifying cause of local package build

[Skyler Ferris]

I believe I understand what is happening now, and it is the result of the
way guix releases software and not a bug in my configuration. I put all of
the packages in my system configuration into a manifest and ran `guix weather`
against it, and it said that only 85% of packages have substitutes available.
I had assumed that substitutes should be available and either there was
something in my configuration that was causing me to download an old version
of a package, which had presumably been deleted from the server, or that I
was telling it to build some unexpected variant. But thinking about it more,
updating a guix system is just pulling down package definitions, which become
available before the substitute server finishes building everything. And it has
a lot to build. So I think this is just expected, and guix decides to build the
software locally instead of just refusing to let me upgrade.

I could probably configure the system to use a commit from a short time ago
which still has substitutes available, but I have been meaning to minimize my
system anyway since I don't use much beyond a terminal in guix. And this means
I will remove most of the packages that take a long time to build, and the
remaining long-build packages are things like the kernel which do have
substitutes available.

Sincerely,
Skyler