Re: extend ’guix archive’?

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Tue, 21 Dec 2021 at 00:50, Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us> wrote:

> I think it would be great if one of the pastures to which we herd the nars 
> would be a free and open source software mirror site. In my experience, 
> these are usually some static web hosting in front of a large disk with a 
> place to run scripts to sync the content. A database server may not be 
> available. I'd like to support this use case because I think it is a great 
> way to build bridges to the communities who run or gather around these 
> mirrors.

Well, from my understanding, it looks like P2P distribution. ;-)


> I'd also like the ability fetch nars directly from the local-to-me mirror 
> rather than having them be proxied through a far way server.

Well, from my understanding, it looks like CDN. :-)


> One of the things that I really like and find empowering about Guix is 
> that the developer/system administration tools are as available, easy to 
> use, and convenient as the every day tooling. To the extent possible, I 
> think that we should strive to make our syncing/mirroring solution 
> practical to run for local, small setups, and not require project-scale 
> infrastructure or coordination between many programs that are not captured 
> in a Guix service.

At some point I agree, but I would like to mitigate.  The issue is
scaling up.  It is not easy and it requires a lot of effort, solve a
large range of bugs or design issues, etc.  Scaling up comes with a
cost.  To be concrete, one example: Cuirass migrated from SQLite to
PostgreSQL.  And at some point, the project should rely on existing
bullet-proof solutions for scaling up instead of reinventing the wheel
with all what it implies and focus on the project strengths.  And
bullet-proof solutions able to scale often mean not-so-easy small
setups.  Well, hard to find the right balance. :-)


Cheers,
simon