Subject: [bug#36738] [PATCH] guix deploy: Support '--no-grafts' and '--system'

From: Christopher Lemmer Webber <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:45:46 -0400

Jakob L. Kreuze writes:

> [email-masked] (Jakob L. Kreuze) writes:
>
>> Great idea. I think that continuing to call the machine's
>> <operating-system> 'system' would be confusing if we introduced the
>> notion of a target architecture, because we use "system" to refer to
>> the target architecture in the rest of Guix's command-line tools.
>> Maybe it would make sense to rename the <operating-system> field to
>> 'os' or something similar, and use the 'system' field to specify the
>> target architecture instead? Any thoughs?
>
> Actually, I had a thought. Why should we make this explicit, when we
> could take an implicit approach and identify the target's architecture
> with 'remote-eval'? Ideally, we'll be probing the machines anyway to
> implement safety checks on the <operating-system> declaration, so why
> not just add this to our list of pre-deployment tests?
>
> Regards,
> Jakob

Maybe a good idea... let me think.  Is there any case where we start
taking actions *before* we might probe a machine that we can think of?

How would we also probe it?  Is there a chance of our probing behaving
incorrectly?  That would also be bad, if so.

Another route is to have the user specify what architecture they think
the machine has, and instead the probing is a "safety check"?