Re: Solstice infrastructure hackathon

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org> writes:

> We should clearly host some services such as the Guix website on
> Berlin & Bordeaux to bring some redundancy. However, as far as
> substitutes building is concerned, redundancy is premature when
> maintaining a single system, with our limited human and hardware
> resources, proves to be so complex.
>
> What do other people think?

I have a very unqualified opinion, which is directly related to the fact
that I’m interacting with ci.guix.gnu.org (and the software on it)
daily, but I have no idea what bordeaux is running.  I never contributed
to the build coordinator, never configured it, never fetched substitutes
from there either.

So to me the practical value of Cuirass as it exists now is quite
obvious, because I’m pretty familiar with it, have run an own instance
in the past, and many of our services (like the aforementioned installer
images) depend on it.

I feel strongly that maintenance and improvements to Cuirass should not
fall exclusively on Mathieu’s shoulders, so it would be wonderful if we
had more people hack on Cuirass.  That said, I don’t see exploratory
work on an alternative way to build substitutes as a redirection of
resources that would be needed elsewhere.  Motivation is not fungible.

The existence of these two systems affects our resources in that build
machines are added exclusively to either one or the other system.  This
has primarily implications for our limited aarch64 build nodes.  For
x86_64 we’ve got the vast majority connected to ci.guix.gnu.org.

Personally, I consider the continued development and improvement of
Cuirass to be essential.  When it comes to scarcity of build nodes I
think the solution should be to buy more.

-- 
Ricardo