Hello,
> I think we do have the obligation to clearly document channels-with- > substitutes-available and make it so that this particular piece of > documentation can easily be found by everyone who is potentially > affected by slow-downs. Perhaps we might even want to include an > option in the installer to set up /etc/guix/channels.scm to only use > channels with available substitutes. But using it as a default without > communicating this fact to the users would be a poor idea in my > opinion. I fear that a lot of users are not aware of this mechanism and do not really understand why "guix pull" sometimes starts building stuff. We could maybe proceed this way: 1. Enable the channel-with-substitutes-available snippet by default. 2. Add a command line option --without-available-substitutes. 3. Add a new info message when the fetched commit is not the latest commit, to minimize the risk you are mentioning above. Something like: Skipping N new commits that do not have any available substitutes, use the --without-available-substitutes option to update anyway. WDYT? Thanks, Mathieu
