Re: Medium-term road map

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hey!

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 2. Search on all the packages included in Guix since the Big Bang.
>>
>> It is difficult to find the Guix commit where one package goes in and
>> the commit where it goes out. The Guix Data Service (GDS) helps a lot
>> for that! But AFAIK, it is not possible from the CLI and I do not find
>> it handy when I need it (just because I need to open a webbrowser,
>> etc.).
>>
>> IMHO, there is 3 questions:
>>  - how to build such full historical index locally? Even if it is expensive
>>  - how to fetch it from GDS? Or any other substitue?
>
> It's far from "the Big Bang", but the data.guix.gnu.org instance of the
> Guix Data Service has data going back to the start of 2019, with some
> big gaps that are still being filled in. Once that's happened, it'll be
> feasible to start looking at going further back.
>
> On your point about fetching data, the Guix Data Service can return data
> in JSON, and it's been mentioned that there could be something like the
> (guix ci) module, but to access the Guix Data Service. Once the data is
> available, it would at least be feasible to use that for a command line
> interface.

Yup, that’s the most practical approach.

We could write a program to build a database locally (I very much like
the idea of “substitutes” viewed as an optimization compared to local
computation) but that would be expensive, although it could be
incremental.

I suppose we could reuse relevant bits of the Data Service as a library.

Hmm thinking about it, by building the package-cache derivation of each
Guix revision, one already gets a lot of information, and that is
substitutable.  Food for thought!

Ludo’.