On Fri, 26 Dec 2025, Jakob Kirsch wrote:
Hello everyone,
I have a rather simple but pretty useful proposal.
I propose to add a patches field to the channel record that takes a list of
patches to be applied on top of the channel's checkout.
From what I can see, the general infrastructure to apply patches exists already
as it's used for the (guix quirks) module.
I've had many situations where I had an open merge request for upstream Guix or
some other channel and wanted to use it already.
While I could just rebase my patch onto the HEAD manually and then pull from my local
checkout, it would be easier and cleaner to be able to specify a list of patches (e.g. a
list of store items or local file paths) that are then applied since this automatically
"rebases" them on top of the HEAD.
I'm happy to hear your thoughts on this.
Hey,
Thanks for bringing this up. I'm highly attracted to the concept of this
idea. To me, one of the great things about Guix is how (relatively) easy
it makes it for folks to exercise their software freedom, and this appears
to make it even easier, while maintaining the authentication of updates.
I'm curious to hear from others, particularly about the technical merits.
Best,
Jack
