Subject: Re: bug#40985: building profile with 1 package
From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
To: Alexandru-Sergiu Marton <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 14:15:40 -0400
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 07:53:21PM +0300, Alexandru-Sergiu Marton wrote:
> For more than a week now, whenever I do a guix pull, it tells me it's
> building a profile with 1 package. If I do other operations, such as
> removing a package, it displays the number of packages installed in my
> profile correctly (180-ish).
> 
> Here's the bit that it's outputting at the end of guix pull:
> 
> building CA certificate bundle...
> building fonts directory...
> building directory of Info manuals...
> building profile with 1 package...
> building /gnu/store/1lbks2qii5fdwigln34yd4cpvg5gxk7i-inferior-script.scm.drv...
> building package cache...
> building profile with 1 package...
> 
> I'm confused by this behaviour. It has not changed in the last two
> `guix system reconfigure`s I did.

Guix can manage multiple profiles, each with their own history, and that
is what's happening here. By default, there are two profiles: the one
that deals with Guix itself, and the one that contains your installed
packages.

`guix pull` uses the former, found at '~/.config/guix/current'.

You can interact with this profile using the '--profile' argument to
`guix package`. For example:

------
$ guix package --profile=$HOME/.config/guix/current --list-generations
Generation 115	Mar 27 2020 03:05:01
  guix	260eae7	out	/gnu/store/ynihdaa8ripvrw2mzxdslhl3av938jpp-guix-260eae789
[...]
$ guix package --profile=$HOME/.config/guix/current --switch-generation=115
switched from generation 121 to 115
------

On the other hand, when you install packages, Guix uses the default
profile, which is found at ~/.guix-profile.