Re: Can general compute and packaging be more formally merged into a single case?

[Josh Marshall]

Neat!  I'll go digging and see what I can find.

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019, 16:22 zimoun <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Josh
>
> On Tue, 3 Dec 2019 at 18:34, Josh Marshall
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > At the airport, thinking on the fundamental differences between gwl and
> > guix.  It seems like these can be articulated as the same case when
> > considering a tracked and linked compute history.
>
> On address@hidden, from my understanding, we are discussing that
> and it seems related to the Content Addressable Store (CAS).
>
> Otherwise, about the differences between GWL and Guix, you can dig in
> some archeology; especially read the initial proposal by Roel and the
> comments by Ludo. (I think I already pointed to you where the related
> messages live.)
>
> > How I see this, when packaging you take checksums off of inputs not for
> > your own assurance that they are correct (though you could) but to ensure
> > that under different circumstances another user can be sure that they
> have
> > the right starting points.  Then as a matter of storing results and
> > ensuring the integrity of our results for later we take more checksums.
> > What we can do is to create a unit computational step of sorts whereby a
> > user enters a monitored shell whereby they install packages, perform
> their
> > work, and produce changes which can be taken to be outputs.
>
> This already works in GWL. :-)
>
> >All downloads,
> > uploads, and files changes tracked.
>
> To me, it is not clear how GWL should track this because they can be
> really huge.
>
> > Then perform a basic minimization
> > algorithm to reduce the inputs so long as the outputs do not differ.
>
> Which kind of minimization algorithm do you have in mind?
>
> > This
> > optimized unit computational step can then be tracked with the input
> > checksums and outputs.  This merges general compute and packaging, then
> > adding compute power only needs to scale here.
> >
> > From these, computational chains may also be produced to know a full
> graph
> > of what is happening.  Thoughts?
>
> It is already the case. If I understand well.
>
>
> All the best,
> simon
>