Login
You're viewing the mastodon.dunklecat.dev public feed.
  • tmw 🌈tmw@ioc.exchange
    Oct 2, 2026, 12:48 PM

    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

    💬 1🔄 1⭐ 2

Replies

  • tmw 🌈tmw@ioc.exchange
    Oct 2, 2026, 2:43 PM

    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

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • tmw 🌈tmw@ioc.exchange
    Oct 2, 2026, 2:50 PM

    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.

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • tmw 🌈tmw@ioc.exchange
    Oct 2, 2026, 2:56 PM

    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.

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • tmw 🌈tmw@ioc.exchange
    Oct 2, 2026, 6:10 PM

    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

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Ludovic Courtèscivodul@toot.aquilenet.fr
    Oct 3, 2026, 10:16 PM

    @tmw Hello! If you want to have good provenance tracking not just for the config file but also for the modules, you need to turn those modules in a channel.

    That way ‘guix system describe’ will show not just the config file but also the commit of that channel (it would really deserve a Cookbook entry).

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0