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

From: "Thompson, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 13:05:01 -0400

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 6:48 PM Jakob L. Kreuze
<[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> [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?

I don't see a compelling reason for the architecture to be a part of
the machine data type at this time.  I'd like to avoid such low-level
details if possible because I don't think they will translate well to
more complex methods of deployment.

- Dave