aha: the provenance-service-type section of the guix manual explains it for me

In particular, configuration.scm itself is insufficient if it is not self-contained—if it refers to external Guile modules or to extra files. If you want configuration.scm to be self-contained, we recommend that modules or files it refers to be part of a channel.

hmm... guess it would be helpful for me to read about how to create a channel

basically, i wasn't wrong in my thoughts about how this worked before. i just had barely thought or learned about it, and was only incidentally doing things correctly. 🙃

oh, and that has probably not changed much.

i say "magic" because my system config specifically looks for modules in /etc/guix-config/modules...

..but actually, i guess once the system is configured, it probably doesn't need to deal with the configuration file anymore...? this is probably something i should know by now but, well, i don't! lol

aha, and as for sops, i see that the sops files get added to /gnu/store too. okay, that makes sense.

this is all how it's supposed to be, of course... i mean, guix systems are supposed to have things like this in the store.

okay, so this was self-testable. i have been copying my config and all custom modules to /etc/guix-config every time i reconfigure, partly because i thought it's a nice place to put it, and partly because i thought it might be required.

but if i intentionally try to break a module, or even if i move /etc/guix-config to /etc/guix-config-nonexistent, a system generation that started before continues to start just fine. even my sops secrets files don't need to be present where i expect them to be.

there is probably some magic going on here that i don't yet understand

starting to see the errors of my ways in my recent #guix config changes. there are multiple.

right now, one thing i am wondering is, do any of you split your guix config up into multiple files (modules), and if so, are those modules automatically part of the system generation so that using a previous generation will use an previous version of those modules, too? and if so, how do you inspect the previous modules? i only know how to find the previous configuration.scm

edit: it's magic?

edit: about provenance

cats: what are they?