[bug#45104] pull: Add a "with-substitutes" option.

[zimoun]

Hi Mathieu,

On Mon, 07 Dec 2020 at 16:39, Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org> wrote:

> When "guix pull" is run before the CI server is done baking substitutes,
> the user may need to build some derivations, which can be long on
> low-end hardware.

Yeah…


> This patch adds an option to "guix pull" so that it updates to the
> latest commit with available substitutes.

Cool!  It improves my ugly bash to pull 2 weeks behind. :-)


> This work is still in progress, but I'd like to gather some impressions
> on that before going further.

With your patch, it is possible to never pull something.  Because the
push are faster than the CI is able to build.

Therefore, an improvement could to be to check the latest commit on the
CI, if not available fallback to the previous, repeat until one is
available or repeat X time and raise a warning.


Cheers,
simon