Subject: Re: bug#58149: guix pull error

From: Matthieu Haefele <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2022 17:15:35 +0200

Hi,

Le 06/10/2022 à 15:56, zimoun a écrit :
>
> Well, what do you think that could be helpful?
>
Personally, when I installed  guix for the first time, I had very few clues on what it was, how it was working and I guess that's 
the case for most people following the "installation" section of the doc. So I went for the "recommended way" with the shell 
installer script, and as it did the job, when I arrived to the paragraph starting with "If you prefer to perform the installation 
steps manually or want to tweak them", I just stopped reading and switched to examples using guix.

But I got the information that `guix pull` updates my guix installation. I understood later that a guix daemon was running and 
actually executing in root space things I was asking. When I realised this, I did not realise that `guix pull` as simple user was 
not updating the daemon. Thinking of it now, it looks obvious, but as a guix newbie, there is some much other things to absorb, it 
is very easy to overlook it.

I would do at least the two following things :

1. If it is technically possible, depending on the difference between the current installed and the latest available versions of 
the daemon, I would print at the end of a `guix pull`, a message asking for the upgrade of the guix daemon going from the notice 
of these versions to a critical warning.

2. in the documentation, in "2 Installation", right after "Once installed, Guix can be updated by running guix pull (see Invoking 
guix pull). ", I would add something like "From time to time it is needed to upgrade your guix installation (see Upgrading Guix)".

HTH !

More generally, the guix doc is very well written, compact and informative, but it is like an encyclopedia. You have to read it 
almost entirely and extract  the basics from large amounts of advanced features to get started. I totally agree with Konrad 
Hinsen's comment on the documentation at the last 10 years birthday conference, some first level / tutorials like documentation is 
missing. I took some notes during my guix learning process and I started to put them on this wiki page 
<https://gitlab.inria.fr/fuentes/guix4n00bs/-/wikis/home> (well, in French...). I can try to find some time to go on with this 
exercise ... if you find it relevant of course.

Best,
Mat