Guix: Hold Back Packages

It is good practice to keep software up to date but some packages like openjdk might need to stay with a certain version, e.g., openjdk@11:jdk for some other software or tools to work correctly.

We can use the guix package command with the –do-not-upgrade <regexp> switch. For the example above, we can upgrade all our packages except openjdk with

$ guix package --upgrade . --do-not-upgrade openjdk

where openjdk is the regular expression that matches the installed package (e.g., openjdk@11.0.22:jdk.)