Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

>> - Include synopsis and descriptions.  Maybe we should include all fields
>>   that are searched by `guix search`.  This incurs a cost on the
>>   database size but it would fix the `guix search` speed issue.  Size
>>   increases by some 10 MiB.
>
> Oh so this is going beyond file search, right?
>
> Perhaps it would make sense to focus on file search only as a first
> step, and see what can be done with synopses/descriptions (like Arun and
> zimoun did before) later, separately?

We can do this in a 2nd step, no problem, I only did the benchmark to
answer Simon's question whether we could include both data in the same
database and which size/speed cost it would incur.

> It would be nice to see whether/how this could be integrated with
> third-party channels.  Of course it’s not a priority, but while
> designing this feature, we should keep in mind that we might want
> third-party channel authors to be able to offer such a database for
> their packages.

Wouldn't it work automatically for any substitute server?

>> - Find a way to garbage-collect the database(s).  My intuition is that
>>   we should have 1 database per Guix checkout and when we `guix gc` a
>>   Guix checkout we collect the corresponding database.
>
> If we download a fresh database every time, we might as well simply
> overwrite the one we have?

But then we would miss the database when switching Guix generation.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/