Hello, sadly I can't help with the guix pull error, don't know a lot about it unfortunately. I do have some comments on the other questions.
On Mon, 06 Nov 2017 09:16:56 +0100 Marco van Hulten <[email protected]> wrote: > After this I should execute this command. > > > $ guix system reconfigure > > guix system: error: wrong number of arguments for action 'reconfigure' > reconfigure (and some (maybe all?) of the other system commands) require a config file. So 'guix system reconfigure /path/to/config.scm' should work. > > I expected this not to work properly anyway because 'guix pull' did not > succeed, but this seems like a syntax error that would have come up > also after a correct 'guix pull' (except, of course, if 'guix pull' > would provide files that account for the right number of arguments — > but I don't understand Guix well enough to make any good presumptions > about it). > > > Finally, have two more general questions (possibly related) about > Guix. > > Firstly, it often says that I need to use '--fallback'. Is that > because the binary is not available? > '--fallback' means that guix will fall back to compiling from source if it can't download binaries (also called substitutes). By default guix tries to download substitutes from the build farm (hydra). > > Secondly, I noted that with, e.g., 'guix package -i kodi' software gets > compiled. I understood that GNU Guix is capable of both binary and > source packages. Which should I typically expect? Can I choose? > It seems to me I usually get core and common packages as substitutes (binaries). There is the ‘--no-substitutes’ command line flag to disable substitutes and always build from source. I can't see a flag for disabling source builds. You'll find this information in the guix info pages, specifically under "common build options" and "invoking guix system". > -Marco Thomas
