Re: Reproducible Research Hackathon: Friday, July 3rd

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Pjotr,

Thank you for sharing your plans.

On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 23:57, Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> wrote:

> GenNetwork1 depends on Python 2.4(!) with modules that have not been
> updated this century, and an older version of Apache with mod_python,
> amongst other things. We would like to use the guix time-machine
> feature to run older versions on demand in containers, also for the
> recent GeneNetwork2 version which runs on a modern Guix stack. When we
> get it to work I would like to push the older packages in Guix-Past.

I guess that the recent commit [1] by Efraim is part of this effort. :-)

By container, what do you have in mind:
    guix time-machine --channels=file.scm \

 -- environment --container
or 
 -- pack -f 
or
 -- system *-image

?

1: https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-past/-/commit/f9fe4d8ac2706834fcff477db8f5421de537d78e


> Note that GeneNetwork requires a largisch MySQL/MariaDB (170GB)
> which is also a snapshot in time. We have 5+ snapshots of that
> database that go with 5+ versions of the code. We want to run them all
> under Guix so we no longer have to care about the underlying Linux
> distro.

I agree that Guix does not have (yet!) good management of large data
set.  The /gnu/store is not designed for that, if I have correctly
understood.  Even we have already discussed Content-Addressable Storage
(CAS) on gwl-devel@gnu.org, AFAIR, we have not ended up with a good
plan.  Well, it will not be fixed on Friday. :-)

But for sure, it is something to keep in mind.


So, see you on Friday. :-)

Cheers,
simon