Stale Guix version

[imiric]

Hi, thanks a lot for this Docker image. It's great for bootstrapping a Guix system.

One issue I ran into recently is related to the stale version of Guix inside the container. I was surprised that running guix pull doesn't update to the most recent version, but actually uses a commit from February 2025. This was causing issues when I tried to use dhcpcd-service-type, since it doesn't exist in that version. After some digging, I saw that this is caused by the commit pin in ~/.config/guix/channels.scm.

I worked around this by using guix time-machine, but it took me a while to figure this out.

I understand that for purposes of CI it's desirable to pin to a known working version, but at the same time running guix pull should update to the latest available version.

Could there be a solution that makes it possible to pin a specific version in CI via e.g. an environment variable, but otherwise the version bundled in the image is used, and guix pull is allowed to update it?

Maybe there's a better and more idiomatic solution I'm not considering, or this is not an issue for your use case, but I'd appreciate any thoughts and suggestions. At the very least, documenting this behavior in the README would help. Thanks!

[viferga]

Hey @imiric I just saw the issue yesterday. If you want me to answer faster you can always quote me.

I am working in few big changes on the project, for now I have updated to 1.5.0 and we achieved to compile all the architectures available: https://github.com/metacall/guix/actions/runs/20823738124

Respect to your issue, you are completely right, it's something it must be put in the docs and also it is important to provide a way to the end user to skip it.

I have added this section where you can check all the design decisions: https://github.com/metacall/guix?tab=readme-ov-file#design-philosophy

I am not sure how we can skip this, maybe introducing a new command inside the scripts folder to unpin the channels.scm and document it? I am already doing something like this:
https://github.com/metacall/guix/blob/master/test/channels-check.scm

guix/test/test.sh

Line 42 in 495e81c

CHANNELS_CHECK="${SCRIPT_DIR}/channels-check.scm"

Here I am just reading the commit but we could force it to delete and overwrite the file, it should not be difficult with Guile.