Re: Guix on mobile phones

[Csepp]

"W. T. Meyer" <w@wmeyer.eu> writes:

> Caleb Herbert <csh@bluehome.net> writes:
>
>> I hope there's a way to suppress compiling from source. I don't want
>> to be compiling stuff on a mobile device.
>
> I think offloading build processes to another machine defined in
> /etc/guix/machines.scm would be a more useful solution than to suppress
> building things from source.
>
> For initially provisioning a system one could probably try to make use
> of guix system image to create an initial base image of Guix for a
> respective mobile device to keep the amount of work to be done at said
> device to a minimum.
>
> - Wilko

This assumes that everyone has access to an offload machine.
Based on my experience with Guix on a netbook, there absolutely needs to
be a way to disable building things locally.  There is no point in
wasting battery life, storage space, and bandwidth on eg. trying to
build Icecat on a machine with 1GB of RAM.
Either the upgrade should fail until all substitutes become available or
it should do a partial upgrade.