Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 11:23:50PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:
> 
> > Great :). I would make it a little clearer that this is
> > 'bootstrapping' and hype it a little more that now there is no reason
> > NOT to install Guix. Only 100Mb on your HDD.
> 
> Not sure how to do that, would you like to propose actual text?
> The thing is, I want it to remain accurate and factual.

The current text is fine. 

> What do you meaning by moving a package with dependencies?

I am thinking about Nix-style closures. But it may only confuse
things. I don't think the Guix manual covers closures.

> > BTW when Nix decided to go for a meta-database they lost something. I
> > know it has good reasons (performance mostly) but it took away the
> > self-containedness of packages. It would be nice just to be able to
> > copy/del packages and rebuild the meta information. Do we have
> > something like that? 
> 
> This part is the same as Nix.  The database is here to store meta-data
> about store items, notably the list of references found in a store item.
> Determining this list requires scanning all of the store item???s
> contents, which takes time proportional to the number/size of files it
> contains, so the database can hardly be avoided.

Yes, I understand. But would it be possible to regenerate the database
from an existing /gnu/store? You can see I like to mess around with
files ;). With closures a rebuild should not be necessary, but as a
wary system administrator I know I will need it at some point.

Pj.