Hello, Tomas Volf <~@wolfsden.cz> skribis:
> After ~2 hours of digging I realized this is caused by the changes in > 883e69cdfd226c8f40b6e3b76ce0740b59857de6. > > I see couple of issues here (in no particular order, questions prefixed with > Q): > > * My configuration file just *silently* stopped working. > > That is not great for obvious reasons. > > * There is no news entry Oops, my apologies; the change felt pretty innocuous when I merged it, but in hindsight, it seems clear that a news entry was warranted. Lesson learned. We can still add that news entry, though fewer people will see it now. Thoughts? > * Broken default behavior. > > Currently, out of the box, extra-special-file with "/etc/guix/channels.scm" > just > does not do anything. No error, no warning. That is pretty unexpected. Yes, why is that? At first sight, that’s because ‘extra-special-file’ does things at activation time; there’s no check happening at configuration time. It was really meant for /bin/sh, /usr/bin/env, and similar. The reason its effect is silently dismissed in this case is, I think, because its activation runs before the /etc activation. So it’s really bad luck. I’m not sure what to do here, apart from maybe recommending against broad use of this service. > * There is no terse way to turn it off > > Currently my configuration contains this: > > (modify-services %base-services > (guix-service-type > config => (guix-configuration > (inherit config) > (channels #f)))) Hmm right. You do want to create /etc/guix/channels.scm though, right? (Since you had it initially.) > * Q: Is there an easy way to fill (channels)? > > After I learned that (channels) is a thing, I wanted to use it, but did not > find > any simple way how to do so. My channels are in channels.scm produced by > `guix > describe --format=channels', and I do not see any simple way to pass the > content > of that file into (channels). No, it does not accept (local-file). I tried > just (read)-ing it, but that too does not work. That would be: (guix-configuration … (channels (load "channels.scm"))). > * Q: Is the default value right? > > Currently it defaults to %default-channels, which causes all this magic. > Would > it not be better to default to #f, so that it would do nothing magical out of > the box and would be backwards compatible? You could still turn it on by > (Somehow? See above.) providing desired value. Yes, we could change the default to #f: it’s equivalent to ‘%default-channels’ but wouldn’t cause the undesirable side effect you experienced. Do you want to prepare a patch (or two)? :-) Thanks for your feedback, and apologies again for the inconvenience! Ludo’.
