Re: "guix pack -f docker" does too much work

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Michal Atlas <michal_atlas@posteo.net> skribis:

>>> Also seems that Nix's way only quickly imports the changed layers? And
>>> Guix's always imports the whole thing, at least I think?
>> What do you mean by “imports the whole thing”?
>
> I'm not sure what exactly happens, so correct me if I'm wrong, however
> if I time the different approaches, I think that how Guix creates a
> single-layered image, then if anything changes the entire image gets
> re-imported into docker.

Oh, there’s the quite recent ‘--max-layers’ option:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html

However the default is to create a single layer.  Maybe worth changing
to 32 or so?  Oleg, WDYT?

(We should also document the default value of ‘--max-layers’ in the
manual: I had to check the code…)

> On that note, I know that guix pack goes through %compressors in
> order, however zstd is an insane improvement over gzip when working
> with containers, would it perhaps be possible to default to it, or
> would that break far too many workflows, or is there another reason?
> Perhaps during changing how guix pack works would be a good time to
> make both breaking changes at once?

If Docker itself always understands zstd, then we could change the
default, indeed.

For other backends, such as plain tarballs, we could make that change
but it’s going to be potentially more of a breaking change.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.