bug#65788: poor information when updating using “guix time-machine”

[Simon Tournier]

Hi Ludo,

On Sat, 28 Oct 2023 at 16:16, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

>> Why not move this ’validate-guix-channel’ to internals.  Somehow, it is
>> in guix/scripts/ because it captures ’ref’.  However, this capture is
>> redundant and is normally managed by ’channel-list’.  Therefore, I would
>> be tempted to have this validation for the reachable commit close to the
>> “Updating” message.
>
> Yes, that’s a good idea.
>
> As I started looking into it, I realized we could reuse the existing
> #:validate-pull mechanism of ‘latest-channel-instances’ for the purposes
> of this commit check in ‘time-machine’.

[...]

> Here’s my proposal to do that:
>
>   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/66793

This improvement does not address this issue with
%oldest-possible-commit, right?

In addition, we also need to consider ’inferior-for-channels’ which
calls ’cached-channel-instance’ – currently with the default (const #t)
for #:validate-channels.

For an instance of bug with inferiors, please look at:

        Dependence on an old version of a package.
        Philippe Veber <philippe.veber@gmail.com>
        Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:18:50 +0100
        id:CAOOOohRJu0QH+czx3qAwNxCY0X9JBd4NdUd9vjBvt-kDFCHkmA@mail.gmail.com
        https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2023-12
        
https://yhetil.org/guix/CAOOOohRJu0QH+czx3qAwNxCY0X9JBd4NdUd9vjBvt-kDFCHkmA@mail.gmail.com


Cheers,
simon