Re: Installation-Protocol for GuixSD x86_64 v0.15-preview

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Björn,

Björn Höfling <address@hidden> skribis:

> as Ludo "requested", today I freshly installed GuixSD in a QEMU
> environment (x86_64 on both host and virtual env) to check the
> installation process of the upcoming release.
>
> Overall result: Yes, it worked, no big trouble! There are some things I
> noticed I want to share here. I know you all do a good job here, so
> take this just as observations. Whoever has the time might take one. And
> I'm really picky when I should test something :-)

Thanks a lot for testing and providing detailed feedback!  I think
Tobias and Marius already commented on most issues; some can be fixed
for 0.15, others are unfortunately trickier to address.

> Starting point/environment Guix from git, being on commit:
>
> 6e65eb3cad1d1148eade9ed2228cdea90d531a94
> From: Mon Jul 2 00:08:54 2018 +0200

I made some adjustments to ‘guix system init’ later today, but it
shouldn’t make a big difference here.

Did you have troubles with substitutes?  In particular, did it hang as
described in <https://bugs.gnu.org/31925>?  (I’m still experiencing it
occasionally and I can’t believe I’m the only one.)

> ...
> note: currently hard linking saves 206.08 MiB
> guix gc: freed 91,50781 MiBs
>
> The first line is written in English with a decimal point. The last line is 
> written in English, although the decimal separator is German [Furthermore, 
> It's more confusing to report the 0.00081 MiBs, i.e. about 80KiB saved space. 
> Rounding should be done after 3 places].

The English part comes from the C++ code base, which is not i18n’d,
whereas the other line comes from the Scheme part, which is i18n’d.

Here the Scheme code prints numbers according to your German locale;
however, there’s apparently no translation of the message itself, which
is why it still says “freed”.  Weird, I agree.

> 12) ls | less
>
> ls has a colored output. Nice.
> ls | less has ugly escape sequences. Only ls --color=no | less works.

As discussed on IRC with Tobias, that’s a mistake; we should use
--color=auto.  Tobias, are you committing this change?  :-)

Thanks!

Ludo’.