“Time travel without borders”
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/time-travel-without-borders/
On the freshly implemented ability of ‘guix time-machine’ and ‘guix pull’ to download channel files without putting you at risk.
Discussion
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@civodul This looks very nice! Now if only "guix shell" could also download a manifest file... via a SWHID of course. All the convenience of curl ... | sh without the problems.
@khinsen About `-m manifests.scm`, yeah it could super useful to have.
• About downloading from SWH, it’s straightforward.
• About loading inside an isolated environment, well manifest.scm file might provide complex Scheme code dealing with package transformations or inferiors. So, I don’t know if it’s doable or wanted.
@khinsen About loading manifest.scm inside isolated Guile environment, it might be more annoying than expected. For instance, channels.scm files are usually very boilerplate and already two reports:
https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/issues/8519
https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/issues/8573
Well, an option for being able to isolate might be helpful but it should not be the default for manifest.scm file, IMHO.
@khinsen @zimoun Oh but the question is whether manifest files should be isolated as well—I should read more carefully. :-)
I’d lean towards “no”, because like you wrote, manifests can be and often are more advanced than just lists of package names.
Conversely, channel files are almost always trivial, with ‘channel-with-substitutes-available’ being perhaps the only attempt to program channel files (but it is little used AFAIK).
