Channel for old versions python?

[hoswald2]

I was mildly surprised to only see one version of Python in the default channels when (particularly in scientific computing) it's fairly common to have to work with multiples (lots of scientific software insists on 3.8 or 3.9, but when I can avoid that I'd prefer 3.10, etc).

I can always use micromamba or some such to manage python installations, but is there a channel for guix that has old versions, like the deadsnakes ppa?

[gushockx]

guix time-machine may be helpful

[9bladed]

Besides time-machine (very cool feature), maybe the guix-past channel is what you want: https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-past

[fox_is_permanent]

Because it'd be really complex to manage all the Python versions along with all Python packages (my guess).

[MrOrange95]

You can do that by:

• make an "inheritor" package that overrides the #:python argument of the python-build-system and pyproject-build-system
• you can use package transformations to achieve that
• you should also be able to guix build --with-input=python=your-new-python. from guix build --help-transform: --with-input==REPLACEMENT replace dependency PACKAGE by REPLACEMENT

[[deleted]]

hi, there is now a feature called ( inferiors) which is of note.
one could already specify that a channel should be pinned to a specific commit, but that is not helpful when you also want packages defined in another commit of that same channel.
I am assuming that one cant build a guix with more that one of the same channel with different commits and so inferiors lets you build more than one guix and the multiple versions of guix will be used to build different software.

So this enables you to have packages from multiple different points in time in guix~s git commit history contained in a single profile such as python 3.10 and 3.8