~ruther/guix-local

457103b90bba42d4eaf508031044548c3ba95723 — Ludovic Courtès 8 years ago 8582e03
doc: Discuss when to run a GC.

* doc/guix.texi (Invoking guix gc): Add a paragraph on when to run a GC.
1 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

M doc/guix.texi
M doc/guix.texi => doc/guix.texi +16 -0
@@ 2315,6 2315,22 @@ package builds referenced by those generations can be reclaimed.  This
is achieved by running @code{guix package --delete-generations}
(@pxref{Invoking guix package}).

Our recommendation is to run a garbage collection periodically, or when
you are short on disk space.  For instance, to guarantee that at least
5@tie{}GB are available on your disk, simply run:

@example
guix gc -F 5G
@end example

It is perfectly safe to run as a non-interactive periodic job
(@pxref{Scheduled Job Execution}, for how to set up such a job on
GuixSD).  Running @command{guix gc} with no arguments will collect as
much garbage as it can, but that is often inconvenient: you may find
yourself having to rebuild or re-download software that is ``dead'' from
the GC viewpoint but that is necessary to build other pieces of
software---e.g., the compiler tool chain.

The @command{guix gc} command has three modes of operation: it can be
used to garbage-collect any dead files (the default), to delete specific
files (the @code{--delete} option), to print garbage-collector