bug#66647: Installation of RPMs produced by ‘guix pack’ is super slow

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

I made friends at work when I told them we could provide an RPM for any
modern package to install on their old RPM-based distro.  :-)

However, installing those RPMs takes a lot of time.  For example,
installing the RPM for ‘gmsh’ (closure: 596 MiB; thousands of files)
takes ~45mn.

Is there something about the metadata generated by (guix rpm) that could
be improved, or are we hitting some limitation of the RPM format or
implementation?

Thanks,
Ludo’.