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2026-09-24.log
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<sham1>Do androids dream of electric llamas <sham1>That would make sense with llama.cpp <Heterochromium>Have the substitution servers not been working properly recently? <Heterochromium>I haven't been able to `guix system reconfigure config.scm` today or yesterday due to connection time outs. <prototypeposting>Hey guys, I'm thinking of switching over from nixOS to guix, cuz nix has a lot of issues with its packages and stuff (and also uses systemd only stinkyyyy) <prototypeposting>Ive looked into guix a bit and it generally seems to be similar enough to where me switching over wouldn't be all too bad. Hopefully using a different init and linux libre doesn't make it impossible to use half the programs I use daily- <ieure>prototypeposting, Seems to be working fine. <j_importer>prototypeposting: it's a rite of passage when you mispaste 50 lines of code into an IRC window and flood the channel :) <lechner>prototypeposting: Which programs do you use daily? <prototypeposting>Steam is honestly what I fear the most won't work, I just looked it up on the package search and there isn't anything there at all <ieure>You need to get it from a popular third party channel. <vibecoping>Guix only packages free software, to my understanding. If I could force feed GabeN money until he fucking exploded into a ball of piss and tears, I would. <vibecoping>There are many games that are fully interesting and respect your freedoms. <ieure>Correct, the only packages that can be included in Guix are Free Software projects which can be built from source. <ieure>lechner, The guy who founded Steam. <prototypeposting>Also guix has support for running standaole binaries that depend on libraries right? I have a lot of random games I have installed outside of steam lol <ieure>prototypeposting, You... can. <ieure>prototypeposting, but it is possibly the worst distro choice there is for that kind of thing. <ieure>Yes. You can use `guix shell --container --emulate-fhs', but then you have to deal with vidya games that want to access hardware. <ieure>I played a video game today. Joust. Great game. <dcunit3d>is it possible to use `/gnu/store` or `/nix/store` to provide git clone bundles as derivation outputs? or is that kinda what's happening? <ieure>prototypeposting, No idea what that is, so uh. Probably not? <ieure>dcunit3d, Works that way already, the source for any package that gets built has its source land in the store. <dcunit3d>So would it be possible to do `git clone guix+git//git@codeberg.org:user/repo#refs/heads/somehow` or `git clone guix+https//codeberg.org/user/repo#refspec`? <prototypeposting>ieure: It basically let's you define packages which can then be used by dynamic binaries, its useful for the very specific situation of running a native program that isn't on the package manager (and likely never will be because barely anyone even uses the linux version anyways) <dcunit3d>and basically proxy through the guix store or nix store? <ieure>dcunit3d, No. `guix download' will download something into the store, but I believe it does not support Git clones. <ieure>prototypeposting, No, there is nothing like this. <dcunit3d>ieure: thanks. i'm trying to think about cloning sets of repositories into environments... however it could be a generally useful feature for git automation... maybe? i'm not sure what it takes to have `git` recognize new `proto+git` combinations. i think a wrapper could get `https+git` to work, but it would be more useful it could trigger `guix download` for some artifacts that don't exist yet <dcunit3d>it's a completly random idea for completely random purposes, but in a way, it leads to an "inversion of control" for some aspects of source artifact management. <dcunit3d>usually when i'm thinking about stuff like this, i discover that it already exists ... much later <dcunit3d>later on, i could imagine some security issues with this, but i tend to get <dcunit3d>ahead of myself there (but if it's safe enough for guix/nix to have pulled a <dcunit3d>repository into the guix-daemon's workspace, then i think those issues don't <dcunit3d>prototypeposting: there are some ways around this. e.g. with guix containers <dcunit3d>a few possibilities that i've been interested in with guix are like thin build-system wrappers. for example, a thin AFL wrapper to swap out build toolling and set a few flags for make & for compilation. <dcunit3d>another example is a `makefile2graph` build system that drops most of the later build-system phases and instead just produces a 'makefile.dot' output that can be transformed to SVG/etc <untrusem>you could add a phase for this but I get you <dcunit3d>other examples: generate SVG or Graphviz from protobuf's in a project, or build things like json schemas, openapi stuff. <dcunit3d>true, but i'm not interested in building the project necessarily. i'm more interested in understanding the code. <dcunit3d>one more example: analyze a sqlite or postgresdb schema and then produce graphviz/plantuml output. <dcunit3d>sometimes getting this stuff to work is hacky. other times, it's like 5 minutes. but it could just be a few short scripts/transformations if i didn't need to be concerned with how the sources were cloned & where they live <dcunit3d>but 95% of the effort goes into that (and so it's more like an hour of time instead of 5 minutes) <dcunit3d>the main difference between this approach and using LLMs for code analysis is this is usually deterministic (and also very simple to specify if you know what you're doing) <dcunit3d>once i've got the outputs like *.puml, *.dot or *.schema.json, i'm usually a bit stuck at that point, since working with ontological data is complicated. it's tough to filter, but not impossible <dcunit3d>the fuzzing use-case is particularly valuable, though idk whether people would opt to use it these days <dcunit3d>it's kinda sad, since the solutions for getting this stuff to work with nix/guix will also often minimize the komolgorov complexity (w.r.t an agentic solution). that is, the size of the string representing your package/derivation/etc is very small compared to "using 1,000,000 tokens to wrap simple services with MCP" or whatever people do <dcunit3d>of course, few people valued diagrams, cheatsheets or codesearch enough to focus on it... until it became trivial to mass-produce shiny PNGs and PDFs <dcunit3d>the `guix graph` feature for packages/services completely transformed my ability to understand linux systems. <untrusem>I advice that you send a mail to mailing list too so this don't get lost <avalenn>as you are here perhaps you can tell me why cuirass forks off evaluation to "cuirass evaluate" ? performance? <avalenn>what is the easiest way to deploy Guix on some VM on some cloud provider or similar hoster ? <avalenn>I don't really mind which provider as long as it is easy. <nikolar>you can always install do a foreign distro install <civodul>avalenn: ‘guix deploy’, provided the VPS is supported <civodul>otherwise ‘guix system image’ maybe? <csantosb>Just learned that Guix is used by "French gendarmerie's National Cyber Crime Unit (C3N) for reproducible computer forensics" <civodul>csantosb: oh, where did you see that? <csantosb>In previous link; I haven't found any other ref. <avalenn>csantosb: not ready to engage on 1 full year but I will keep this in mind if the need comes <avalenn>nikolar: foreign distro is already what I have on my main computer (laptop), I want to experiment on the server side and would rather have full Guix experience ther <nikolar>look up how to overwrite the vps disk then <nikolar>i've seen a couple of articles online <bremner>I'm logged in, but not part of the project <efraim>in a private browser window it just asks me to login <civodul>teams are not visible unless you’re a member <untrusem>ohh I think you need to part of maintainer team to access that <bremner>unrelated, I'm trying to cargo cult some code from https://notes.8pit.net/notes/mwpp.html to work for u-boot instead of grub. In general, how to people debug things inside g-expressions? I think the problem is something with regexps and path computation, so I guess I should pull the function definitions out of the g-expression and test them? <bremner>I can, but I'm not sure how that helps? <bremner>(context: I know scheme (racket) reasonably well, but I'm a Guix newb) <untrusem>it is more helpful than you, fix, run, fix terminal cycle <untrusem>generally for package I use `-K` option but it isn't what you need here <untrusem>offtopic, but what u-boot have over grub bremner <untrusem>the site website looks simple and pleasant <bremner>untrusem: it is the standard bootloader on aarch64 machines <bremner>untrusem: basically I have a machine that boots fine using u-boot; I'd prefer not to mess with that. <dlowe>stray thought: using binfmt_misc as #! replacement so the current profile bin directories are searched for an interpreter <nomike>I was in here last night with a network issue and have collected more data now. <nomike>For those who don't, a quck summary: Downloads from ci.guix.gnu.org and bordaux.guix.gnu.org are very slow (~10 KiB/s), hydra-guix-129.guix.gnu.org is fast (~30 MiB/s). <nomike>What I figured out is, that trafic flows from my machine via Magenta, the VIX (Vienna Internet Exchange), and at some point it reaches a connect between Cogent and Aquilenet. Aquilenet seems to be the provider used by Guix. <nomike>There is an issue in the connection between Cogent and Aquilenet. Maybe a broken router or something but most likely on Cogent's side. <nomike>So what I ultimately need is someone from Aquilnet to contact Cogent and tell them to look into this. My ISP can't do nothing as there are multiple hops in between them and Cogent. I can neither contact Cogent nor Aquilnet as I'm not a customer from them and the will likely not wnt to deal with some random residential customer. <nomike>Do we happen to have official business relations with Aquilnet and can someone maybe open a ticket with tnem? I can provide all the details I have. <cbaines>nomike, you can hop over to #aquilenet and ask there, Aquilnet is voluenteer run, but they're often very helpful <nomike>Ahhhh.....coool. Didn't know. I thought it's just another ISP company. Yes, I will definitely do that. Thanks for the hint. <redacted>How do I tell guix system vm which disk image type to use? <redacted>--image-type doesn't seem to have an effect <redacted>I can build my system with guix system image -t efi-raw <redacted>but guix system vm complains that I don't have a properly formatted partition for EFI <redacted>and guix system vm -t efi-raw does the same thing <redacted>so I infer that vm -t efi-raw is doing nothing <empathy_monster>I was going thru the manual, especially Networking, and couldn't seem to find anything about this. I'm pretty sure the only non-free I would need is a wifi driver. Is there a repo available for this by chance? <ryanprior>empathy_monster: there are channels to ask about non-free Guix packages but not this one I'm afraid :) <empathy_monster>Okay, thanks and sorry. There's nothing on the main irc page about that or above listed in the various channel. Would you please be able to direct me to it? <ieure>empathy_monster, I sent you a DM. <ryanprior>no apology necessary, hope you find what you need <ryanprior>if you don't find ieure's DM, a web search for "nonfree guix packages" will get you on the track <empathy_monster>I found the DM. Sorry about asking about non-free here. Genuinely didn't know and won't happen again <calhoun4382>hey when I do guix pull I get like 200 kbits. Is there a way to fix this? <ryanprior>calhoun4382: you can host your own guix repo mirror or use somebody elses to avoid slow codeberg git operations (you do not need to trust the mirror; commits will still be cryptographically signed by your already-trusted keys) and you can host your own substitute servers or use somebody else's to get faster substitutes if you use them. <ryanprior>nobody has attempted that yet afaik. I've looked into it because I would like to have that, but it seems daunting <yelninei_>It would still need prebuilt binaries though? <ryanprior>it's not super clear to me what the minimal bootstrap input requirements are <attila_lendvai>damn, that was long: something screwed up my guix in a way that logging in was seemingly hung (turned out it did succeed logging in after minutes, but only on the pty's). all herd commands hang. nothing useful in the logs. <attila_lendvai>all older generations i tried behaved the same. what fixed it was a home and a system reconfigure. <attila_lendvai>and i suspect what broke it was a guix gc on a fs 100% full. it ran without errors, but i think it has deleted something it shouldn't have. <ryanprior>attila_lendvai: did you try to roll back before you reconfigured? <attila_lendvai>ryanprior, no. but i did try booting older generations, and they were broken the same way. <attila_lendvai>and the reconfigure was downloading quite a lot. i'm not sure, but i think i didn't guix pull since the last reconfigure, and yet a reconfigure was downloading gigabytes <ryanprior>interesting. not trying to second guess what you did, just wondering if you tried to roll back and it failed <yelninei_>ryanprior: With these scripts you still need a bootstrap sdk from somewhere. <attila_lendvai>ryanprior, this has happened to me before, but then it was an actual bug (missing reference for something that was needed and it got GC'd) <new_user>Hello. I switched to an earlier profile generation, that had the "texlive-scheme-full <yelninei_>attila_lendvai: there is now an expat graft so probably thats the resason for all the redownloads <new_user>package installed. However, "pdflatex" is not finding some auxilary files from the package. <new_user>I treied re-sourcing the profile, but it does not seem to work. <new_user>It is a very large package to re-install again, just to test again. What could be going wrong? <attila_lendvai>new_user, profile generation =? guix home generation? or did you boot an older guix system generation? <new_user>attila_lendvai: It is the default profile for the user (guix package --switch-generation=...). <new_user>attila_lendvai: Oh, OK. Thank you for your interest anyway. <attila_lendvai>new_user, there's this thing that if you install a python-foo into a profile, then you must install python also to set some things up. e.g. guix shell python python-foo works, but without python it doesn't, even if you have python available otherwise <new_user>The strange thing is that, back when this generation was current, things worked fine. I am convinced it is not a dependency problem. <noxi>yeah, it's a wonky design choice <noxi>python finds its dependencies in $GUIX_PYTHONPATH, but if you make a shell with only a python library, the profile in question will not export its own $GUIX_PYTHONPATH, only adding python itself to a profile makes it instantiate $GUIX_PYTHONPATH <vagrantc>something incompatible changed in your user's dotfiles ~/.*? <new_user>noxi: That kind of explains why, when I add python to a guix shell command, things work fine, and when I just add the library then the system's Python cannot find the library. <noxi>Yeah, it's a pretty confusing choice imo <noxi>anything with the `pythonpath-build-system` should export $GUIX_PYTHONPATH, instead of _just_ python <new_user>vagrantc: Possibly. But are these kept across generations, like the profiles? <new_user>I have an empty ~/.cache/guix/profiles/. Other than that, I see no other relevant hidden file at $HOME. <vagrantc>could be seemingly irrelevent dotfiles, is what i am getting at <vagrantc>e.g. it used to work with a previous generation but doesn't anymore <attila_lendvai>new_user, did you, by any chance, run a guix gc between the two interesting states? <new_user>attila_lendvai: Hmmm... Yes, I did. However, since this profile generation is still available, I would not expect that to be the cause of the problem. Indeed, the files in question are still found (by me, not pdflatex) on the filesystem. <FuncProgLinux>how does one make sense of the guix-cuirass-bot outputs? I'm not complaining, I just wish to understand why sometimes it reports unrelated packages passing/failing :P <redacted>Looks like it's actually not possible to use guix system vm with an efi system. <PuercoPop>IIUC the user-reviewed label is for when non-committers review the PR. But how can they add the user-review label w/o belong to the organization?