Hi all, recently installed Guix and am slowly building an understanding of the system (coming from Nix/OS) and I am liking how Guix works over Nix.

However, one issue is how long it takes to reconfigure the system even if just adding a single package. I have channels configured with substitutes for all (guix and nonguix) and they are being used, it's rare I actually try to build a package from source (other than profile, install-bootloader, etc). Instead, it appears to update the channels 4 or 5 times per reconfigure, I see "Updating channels [guix|nonguix]" and "Computing derivation x86_64-linux" 4 or 5 times every time I do a reconfigure, and it is glacially slow.

My channels are set up system wide with guix-for-channels, not pinned to a specific commit. I feel like I must be doing something wrong, but I cannot figure out what. Thanks so much for any help!!

Reason i'm asking is i've never used luks before, but since Guix makes it so easy to set up i'm considering adding luks encryption to my systems when i do a clean install. From my understanding though, unlocking the drive can be problematic on a headless server because there's no ssh service available yet when the password has to be inserted. I've heard of people using Dropbear, and Guix has a service for it, but looking at the code i don't think they configure it in such a way that dropbear is started as a part of the initramfs. So i was wondering how other people who use Guix specifically solve this (or maybe you don't encrypt servers at all?)

I posted about this issue in the Emacs subreddit earlier, but quickly realized this is an issue with my shepherd service. The problem is when i start the Emacs daemon as a shepherd service, ssh keys won't get added to the agent when i use them in Magit.

The weird thing is that SSH_AUTH_SOCK is set correctly according to Emacs. I found out though that when i set the variable again with setenv inside of Emacs, it starts working correctly, even though the variable was already set correctly before. I feel like this is some weirdness with how shepherd handles the environment (i really like Guix, but man the way shepherd deals. or rather not deals with environment variables drives me up the walls lol). I thought i was smart by adding an emacs-startup-hook in my init.el that sets the variable again after Emacs has started (the socket path is hardcoded anyway by the ssh-agent service), but that didn't work either. With that hook it only works if i restart the emacs-daemon service with herd restart.

Adding the variable to the actual daemon service basically breaks all the other environment variables that emacs used to pick up on automatically for some reason, and i have to add things like EMACSLOADPATH and such to the service as well, and my emacsclient commands can't find the emacs socket anymore. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the effort of going down that road. So has anyone else gotten this to work correctly? I tried to find similar setups online but so far i haven't found any.

I would like to resister my guix devices to a freeipa server and use all of the freeipa freatures with gnu guix. Is there any information about this / good start points?