On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 03:41:50PM -0400, myglc2 wrote: > The workaround used by sysops where I work (hospital research lab) is to > give notice of R upgrades and to make previous releases available for > reference by ongoing projects. IMO, we should consider how the guix R > recipe(s) might support a pattern of use like this. > > I can assure you that if our users do guix pull and invisibly get a new > R release, their analyses will from time to time break. So we may want a > simple way for them to back down to a previous release. So.. I am > thinking it would make sense to keep previous versions of R in the > recipe. What do others think?
Hi George, If bioconductor tests pass on a new R build they *should* work. Guix is not the same mess that Debian and Fedora are. Note, meanwhile, that a new R install does not remove the old packages automatically. One way to work older versions is by using guix profiles effectively. We introduced Unix modules with Guix, so a module would point to a well tested and working profile. Just make sure it does not get GC'd at some point. Another way to work it is by using a checked out Guix source tree. That is what we do for Genenetwork deployment. Guix 'pull' simply represents a version of the source tree - with its combination of packages. You can force a combination of package versions by keeping track of your own tree. See https://github.com/genenetwork/genenetwork2/blob/master/doc/README.org In the near future I hope we get a version of guix pull which can essentially achieve the same (i.e. a checked out version of the tree). guix pull HASH-tag Pj.
