Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

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

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 10:18:51AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> No, it does nothing remotely.  The manual has an example showing how to
> use it over SSH, but it???s just an example...
> 
> > Would it be an idea to use rsync instead with the --delete
> > switch.
> 
> ... and it has a discussion of bandwidth efficiency and --missing.
> :-)

Ah, OK.

> > You give an example of copying profiles. How about copying a store
> > with and without profile linked packages? That is use case:
> >
> > - copy all current packages in use on the server (in profiles)
> 
> That???s possible, by passing ???guix archive??? the list of profiles.

Maybe an example for all profiles on the system? But yes, this is
doable.

> > and use case:
> >
> > - copy all files, even those not linked to profiles and up for GC
> 
> Even those not linked?  What for?  :-)

Caching. I know guix does not reload files already in the store.

> > When that works that would be the way forward, but it does not drop my
> > wish for being able to regenerate the database.
> 
> My reading of this is different: we need more/better tools to transfer
> whole subsets of a store among different machines (remember we already
> have ???guix publish??? and ???guix offload??? in that area.)
> 
> Once we have those, I think you may stop worrying about the database.  :-)

True if you ignore my message about the state being in two places and
the database can go out of sync/be corrupt.

Rebuilding the database from a store layout would take many of my
concerns away. What do we have against it?

Pj.