Subject: [bug#51427] [PATCH] nix: libstore: Do not remove unused links when deleting specific items.

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2022 19:03:30 +0200

Am Montag, dem 18.07.2022 um 15:57 +0200 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> Hello,
> 
> With commit 472a0e82a52a3d5d841e1dfad6b13e26082a5750 (Nov. 2021),
> partially fixing <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/24937>, there is
> hopefully less pressure to skip the remove-unused-links phase.
> 
> Should we close this issue?
As a hard disk user, I'm leaning towards "no".  In fact, I recently
encountered a case where I think I might want to skip it even if not
deleting "specific items".  For context, my machine has troubles with
sudden power outages during builds (courtesy of a certain graphics card
manufacturer), so if one of those happens during `guix package' or
`guix system' invocation, the sanest thing to do is to run `guix gc'
after reboot and retry whatever command I wanted to run.  However,
since I'm not really deleting much here, I'd probably be fine with
accumulating trash and collecting it at a later date.  Deleting unused
links is also something that can on some machines be postponed to a
time when they'd otherwise be idle, though I don't think it matters too
much in the context of CI since the global lock is no longer held at
that point, while the lack of storage is still blocking builds.

Cheers