Subject: Feature Request: Add ability to disable having cache or generations

From: bo0od <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2021 18:29:56 +0000

Hi There,

Current situation with the guix distro upgrade is:(as i understand)

A) User Packages: whenever there is an upgrade to package A version 1 to 
new Version lets call it A version 2 , So the process is ADD A2 → SWITCH 
to A2 → Cache A1 and so on.

B) System Packages: Same process but it will be saved through generations

This causes unpleasant actions to some users:

- Bloating the disk size
- Having old unnecessary files/packages
- Questionable security of the saved old versions. As it depend if they 
have access to suid or not (i didnt investigate this, but if they have 
then thats big problem but this is not the ticket to discuss it)

I know someone would jump in and say but roll back is great feature and 
its useful and....i know that but like i said might be not suiting all 
users (specially with limited space).

Current manual solution is to delete this extra mess using 2 commands:

guix gc -d 1s && sudo guix system delete-generation

This should be run whenever there is no space left, Or to get rid of the 
old stuff

My suggestion is to have the ability to make Guix automatically just 
having the latest up to date packages without extra consumed storage (no 
cache no generation no nothing more than having the latest packages 
available in the distro).

So the process is ADD A2 → SWITCH to A2 → Delete A1 , Or Download A2 → 
Replace over A1 and so on.

ThX!