Wayne <address@hidden> writes:
my follow up question is whether there is (or a plan for) any
support for sharing these derived custom build binaries with other
users
Yes! For starters, see (guix) Channels in the manual. Here's an online
copy:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Channels.html
Basically, channels provide an easy way for people to share custom
package definitions - but not binaries. It's very nice! Here's a blog
post showcasing them in more detail:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/multi-dimensional-transactions-and-rollbacks-oh-my/
thus basically are there any plans for sharing custom package
definition binaries, perhaps even peer-to-peer? i thought that i had
read something about this on this list but cannot find it currently in
the archives.
The task of sharing package definitions is orthogonal to the task of
sharing pre-built binaries (called "substitutes" in the Guix world).
Sharing package definitions is easy to do now, in a decentralized
fashion, thanks to channels and the distributed nature of Git.
Sharing substitutes is also possible, but less practical. To start
with, you can manually ship around binaries with "guix copy" or "guix
archive". And anyone (with root access) can publish substitutes on a
network for others to use with the "--substitute-urls" build option
simply by invoking "guix publish". You can even set up a build farm
like the one running at berlin.guixsd.org if you want. For details on
how to do that, see the Guix maintenance repository here:
https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=guix
However, getting people to trust your Guix server's key, providing the
substitutes with high availability, and continuously building all the
packages is a non-trivial task. Ultimately, it still feels pretty
centralized. In the future, we hope people will be interested in
contributing to and using a more distributed solution. For example,
integration with something like IPFS or Gnunet would be great! But we
need help from you and others to make it a reality.
For more information, you can check the email lists. I found a few
likely results via the following searches:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=ipfs&submit=Search%21&idxname=guix-devel&max=20&result=normal&sort=score
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=gnunet+publish&submit=Search%21&idxname=guix-devel&max=20&result=normal&sort=score
If you're interested in helping out or know people who might be
interested, please let us know.