Subject: Re: bug#42162: gforge.inria.fr to be taken off-line in Dec. 2020

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2021 11:24:05 +0200

Hello!

I sense a lot of impatience in your message :-), and I also see many
questions.  It is up to us all to answer them, I’ll just reply
selectively here.

zimoun <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On Thu, 7 Oct 2021 at 18:07, Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> wrote:

[...]

>> The second-best solution is to improve our tooling so we can actually
>> keep source code in a more controlled way.  That’s what I had in mind
>> with <https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/source>.  We have storage space for
>> that on berlin, but it’s not infinite.
>
> If Berlin has space, why so much derivations are missing when running
> time-machine?

That’s not related to the question at hand, but it would be worth
investigating, first by trying to quantify that.

For the record, the ‘guix publish’ config on berlin is here:

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/modules/sysadmin/services.scm#n485

If I read that correctly, nars have a TTL of 180 days (this is the time
a nar is retained after the last time it has been requested, so it’s a
lower bound.)

>> Another approach is to use ‘git-fetch’ more, at least for non-Autotools
>> packages (that’s the case for Scotch, for instance.)
>
> This is what I suggested when opening this thread [1] more than one
> year ago.  Reading the discussion and keeping in mind the inertia, I
> do not think it is a viable path.  For instance, you know all the
> pitfalls and you updated Scotch without switching to git-fetch -- no
> criticism :-)  just a realistic matter of facts to have good coverage.
>
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-05/msg00224.html>

Right, and I agree Scotch is a package that can definitely use
‘git-fetch’ (there are bootstrapping considerations of packages low in
the stack, for instance you wouldn’t want to have Git fetched over
‘git-fetch’, but for packages like this there’s no reason not to use
‘git-fetch’.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.