Subject: bug#53162: ’guix shell [email-masked]’ downloads [email-masked]

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2022 11:33:33 +0100

Hi,

On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 11:18, Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Is it a problem that the latest GHC is used to build the package cache?
> (Apart from being surprising and suboptimal.)

Functionally, it appears to be not a blocking problem.  However,
suboptimal means concretely 110+ MB of additional download; well it just
doubles the size of the download.

About the surprise, if one is confident with their Guix skill, then they
look for a bug Guix-side; if one is less confident, then they look for a
twist in their config.  In both cases, it is a diversion – let as the
reader’s judgment if this diversion is fun or a waste of time. :-)

> Some profile hooks, such as ‘gdk-pixbuf-loaders-cache-file’, use the
> package available in the closure (gdk-pixbuf in this case) rather than
> the latest version.  It’s a bit of a hack, but if required, we could do
> that.

What other Haskellers think about the issue?  Fix or document this
surprising behaviour?

Cheers,
simon