On 2025-10-08 22:01, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Eduardo Mercovich <[email protected]> writes:
For English speakers, I didn't understood that before gc I must forget
the roots. That is why the space wasn't liberated.
I can't pretend to understand fully - but new user eyes on a piece of
software is always something to pay attention to - and I may guess wrong
what the mis-conception was here, but I found the mis-conception I'm
thinking of interesting, so bear with me.
It seems there could be a mode (perhaps by default) where 'guix upgrade'
would do 1) upgrade to a new generation, and then 2) delete the previous
generation. I now hear every old-time Guix people scream "oh no, one of
the strengths of guix is to have automatical atomic roll-backs", but if
you think about the terminology used here, an imperative "upgrade" is
not what is happening. "guix upgrade" creates and switches to a new
generation, but leaves the old one around.
I don't expect my idea to actually be implemented, but maybe it humours
someone to think about this from a new user perspective.
A compromise would be a 'guix upgrade --preserve-generations=5' which
could even be the default (and market it is a improvement to reduce the
default ecological footprint of guix), then generations older than 5 are
automatically prunted upon an upgrade. Imperative people can use 'guix
upgrade --preserve-generations=1' and functional folks can use 'guix
upgrade --preserve-generations=INF'.
(This thread prompted me to drop 70 old package generations and 25 home
generations on my laptop, reducing my storage footprint by ~150GB...)
/Simon
Well, you could make an alias or your own script that does this locally.
But now you are saying it, maybe it's not clear enough in the docs. We
use Garbage Collector and Root as terms that might feel obvious (they
are for those that have written garbage collectors) but for newcomers
might be a little bit hard to grasp.
I do like the idea of preserving things by default, but maybe it's just
we didn't explain things properly if at least 2 people had trouble with it.
Cheers,
Ekaitz
