Subject: Re: bug#28659: v0.13: guix pull fails; libgit2-0.26.0 and 0.25.1 content hashes fail

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:30:26 +0200

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès writes:

[...]

>> Perhaps we should make content-addressed mirrors configurable in a way
>> that’s orthogonal to derivations, something similar in spirit to
>> --substitute-urls?  The difficulty is that content-addressed mirrors are
>> not just URLs; see (guix download).
>
> Hmm.  I'm not sure what problem we are solving.  Should we only do this
> for github(-like) tarballs?  Do we see this problem with other sources,
> should we prevent it?  Possibly github will never do something like this
> again.  Or we could banish github/gitlab(?) auto-generated tarballs and
> go for git checkouts+commits?

Content-addressed mirrors help with disappearing and modified tarballs
in general; it’s not just GitHub.

Occasionally we see that problem with tarballs coming from elsewhere:
404 is quite frequent, and in-place modification happens from time to
time (even on ftp.gnu.org…).

Ludo’.