Hi Pierre,
On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 20:39, Pierre Neidhardt <m...@ambrevar.xyz> wrote:
> On a related topic, if 2 users "guix pull", is the whole checkout cloned
> twice?
>From my understanding yes, as I explained before.
Well, I have never timed when installing in a WM a complete Guix System
with the installer. So I did with Xfce selected; it downloads some
pieces, and it took me around 40 minutes with my connection at less than
2Mbits/s, from selecting language to the reboot. Then I boot the
installed VM image, open a terminal with the regular user and hit “guix
pull”. The clone part is fast, couple of minutes, but then it downloads
a lot of substitutes and computes derivations. This first “guix pull”
as regular user takes 20 minutes on my machine, mainly downloading
substitutes.
However, from my understanding, it is unavoidable because I used the
v1.2 image installer, therefore somehow, I fetched all the substitutes
from v1.2, then this first “guix pull” as user fetched the substitutes
corresponding to origin/master. But you did not do that and instead
did:
- guix pull -C my-channels.scm
- guix system init ... /mnt
- reboot
Did you use Tor or something? And what does “guix describe” as root
say?
Note that the first “guix pull” for another user (right after) takes
only 6 minutes, mainly cloning the repo. Basically, on this first “guix
pull” for another user, the cloning+authenticating takes on my machine
~5 minutes.
This part could be improved but it is done only once, take less than 5
minutes with less than 2Mbits/s, so currently I am not convinced that it
is really the bottleneck when pulling the first time from a release
image. Well, it is for sure an issue with low-bandwith network but Guix
is hard to use with low-material though and cloning is maybe the fastest
part. ;-)
Cheers,
simon
