Subject: [bug#72314] [PATCH v1 1/3] website: Redesign home page.

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2024 20:08:34 +0200

A blocking issue, one of your slogans says: "Get the same environment 50
years later".  Guix stood back from this claim so far, although it is
the goal and there is the attempt to preserve.

Could you, Luis, in a new version of the patch add an asterisk that
preserving likely will work but not always and we cannot guarantee this
yet?  Cc to others for opinions.

To quote [1]:

*The vision*  First of all, one clarification: Guix aims to support time
travel, but we’re talking of a time scale measured in years, not in
decades. We know all too well that this is already very ambitious—it’s
something that probably nobody except Nix and Guix are even trying. More
importantly, software deployment at the scale of decades calls for very
different, more radical techniques; it’s the work of archivists.

/End quote.

We could make the confusing claim that Guix helps you ship source code
needed for building, which Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli kind of does for GPL
license compliance reasons [2], but Guix provides a --sources option to
find the sources only for packages and not system images.  Shipping
sources is possible, but not easy and not the goal.  You have a hard
time testing and /etc/hosts blocking network access.

Cc to Simon, Timothy and Vagrant, who are involved with reproducible
builds, and Denis who asked [2] mentioned above.

Regards,
Florian

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/adventures-on-the-quest-for-long-term-reproducible-deployment/
[2]
Thread:
https://yhetil.org/guix-user/20240523020925.1cb0bb2c@primary_laptop/
Individual messages:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2024-05/msg00151.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2024-07/msg00037.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2024-07/msg00069.html