Re: Self-contained Guix tarball

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:
>
>> 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.

Just throwing this out there:

Would it be possible to bundle meta-data files together with store
items?

I guess one could in principle make each store item a directory with any
number of meta-data files plus the actual content of the store item (a
file or directory), but I suppose it would be too big an overhaul of the
design to make this worthwhile.

Taylan