Re: Idea: fallback for guix pull?

[zimoun]

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply.

On sam., 06 août 2022 at 14:12, Christopher Rodriguez <yewscion@gmail.com> 
wrote:
> I haven't looked at the code at all, but perhaps it would be useful to
> users of Guix if, upon a guix pull with a commit that fails to
> authenticate, guix pull would still pull up to the last in the chain of
> successfully authenticated commmits?
>
> Right now, it stops the entire operation if one commit from one channel
> fails to authenticate, which has value (and might be useful as a setting
> or flag, for those with greater security concerns or those maintaining
> the channel).
>
> But assuming the authentications are done in order, could we make the
> default an effective "pin" to the last authenticated commit? This is
> probably the way users /should/ deal with this kind of issue anyway
> (disable-authentication is worrisome), and having the default be this
> kind of fallback would make it so users are still able to pull other
> channels they might have, or at least update to the last "good" commit.

Indeed, authentications are done in order (see ’authenticate-commits’
from (guix git-authenticate)) but the failure raises an error (see
’authenticate-commit’).

Note that the Git repository is already updated.  So, some tweaks would
be necessary to implement your suggestion.  Well, I am not convinced the
use-case is worth the effort.

However, I agree that a channel failing (for whatever reason) should not
be blocking for pulling all the others.  As discussed in bug#57559 [1].


Cheers,
simon

1: <http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/57559>