Subject: [bug#36872] [PATCH 2/2] remote: Remove '--system' argument.

From: Christopher Lemmer Webber <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2019 14:31:58 -0400

Jakob L. Kreuze writes:

> Hey Chris!
>
> Christopher Lemmer Webber <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> I'm still wondering whether asking the remote machine what its
>> architecture is won't turn out to be fragile in some way, though I'm not
>> sure how to articulate how that would be yet.  It seems like a weird
>> side effect to apply before doing the build.  (What if we want to build
>> derivations when we don't actually have a machine up and running yet?
>> Etc, etc.)
>
> I agree that it isn't the purest solution, but my thinking is that
> 'remote-eval' is meant to be effectful anyway. As for the situation
> where we build derivations for a machine that isn't running yet: I think
> we can cross that bridge when we get to it -- 'guix deploy' doesn't have
> the feature at the moment.
>
> Regards,
> Jakob

I thought about it more between yesterday and today, and it continues to
seem strange to me that we're doing "probing" here.  We don't probe to
guess where Guix is currently installed or etc to specify disks.  I
guess that's not the same thing, but...

Here's the concern: imagine that we want to be able to up-front do
something like "guix system build" before we even start spinning up
servers.  Does this block that direction?

Dave, your input appreciated on this one.

I'm not sure I want to block the patch series with my hand wringing, but
I do want to make sure we give it appropriate consideration.

 - Chris