Hi Laurence,
Laurence Rochfort <laurence.rochf...@gmail.com> writes:
Hello all,
Relatively new guix system user.
On a new install of guix system, I did a "guix pull && guix
package -u".
It said I was up-to-date.
I then did a "guix system reconfigure", and that caused a
download of 640Mb
of substitutes.
Could somebody please help me understand why it prompted such
different
behaviour?
Guix doesn’t have a single package state shared by the whole
system, like most traditional Linux distributions, it has
different states depending on context. When `guix package -u'
said you were up-to-date, that was in the context of your user
profile; and when `sudo guix system reconfigure' downloaded
packages, that was in the context of the operating-system itself.
This setup allows users to install packages without needing root
privileges; for different users to have different packages; and
for the versions of those packages to vary, rather than being
shared among all users.
Hope this helps.
-- Ian
