Hi Carlo, On 3 Feb, Carlo Ascani via wrote: > > Greetings, > > I have some preliminary questions before even try to use guix. > > My use case will be: > > - Use guix on a foreign distro (Debian 12) > - Use it especially to create isolated development environment [1] > > My questions: > > - How easy is it to install older versions of packages? [2]
Generally, Guix only has one version of a package available at a time (e.g. one version of Vim available). The Guix repository has all the commits within it for earlier versions of a package. If you 'pin' the version of the Guix repository that you're using then you can install the earlier version of a package. This is done by specifying a 'channels.scm' file where you set the guix repository location and the specific commit to use. There's a specific `guix time-machine` command where you feed in the channels file, along with a manifest file that contains the packages to install: if in a team setting this is how all developers can use the same package versions. There's a few good blog posts out there about this sort of thing, including one I did here: https://www.futurile.net/2023/11/07/guix-time-travel-tricks/ > - Can I specify services to be started in the development environments? [3] (...) Mostly people use `guix shell` to start a ephemeral environment with the packages they want specified. The way that services are run is generally using `guix home`. I think your options here will be to either start a specific service in your main environment (main guix home). I don't _think_ you can do it it in an 'environment-local' directory, as we're still in our main shell environment and running multiple databases will conflict. Is there a specific tool that you're using today that you're thinking of here? The second option is rather than to use `guix shell` use `guix system container` [0]. This will give you a running container that you can then do normal start-up stuff with, such as running a database. The advantage is that this will all be in a declarative configuration file. I don't have an experience with it, so it may take some investigation. HTH, Steve [0] https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Guix-System-Containers.html
