Subject: whishlist: time-machine --channel falls back to SWH

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:17:51 +0200

Dear,

Let’s describe the use case.  Consider that:

  guix time-machine -C channels -- install foo

is provided in some documentation, say scientific paper.  Where the
channels.scm file is completly described:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(list (channel
        (name 'kikoo)
        (url "https://example.org/that-great.git")
        (commit
          "353bdae32f72b720c7ddd706576ccc40e2b43f95")))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

In the future, if https://example.org/that-great.git disappears, then
build/install the package ’foo’ is becoming difficult, nor impossible.

However, let’s consider that the repo ’that-great’ had been saved in SWH
(say manually); since it is a regular Git repo.  Guix should be able to
fallback to it transparently.

Obviously, another whislist is to have something to ease the save
request of the channel on SWH.  Maybe this latter could be part of the
several-times discussed “guix channel” subcommand. :-)

All the best,
simon