Re: Another update on the Guix Data Service

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi!

I’m late to the party and learned about most of these things in the
meantime at the Guix Days, and this is all very cool!

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> There's now a page to compare two derivations [4], it's not a
> particularly clear comparison yet, but can hopefully be improved in the
> future. This is linked to from the derivation history pages [5].
>
> 4: http://data.guix.gnu.org/compare/derivation?base_derivation=/gnu/store/j3n1y6ak2hxs838lm6xx3akljf0xh5qd-guix-1.0.1-10.41b4b71.drv&target_derivation=/gnu/store/x6zncwgmmhf1lq7p805ixhaqfhwdxybk-guix-1.0.1-11.f38eabe.drv
> 5: http://data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1/branch/master/package/guix/derivation-history

I didn’t know about this and it’s really cool!  It’s often necessary to
compare derivations when you want to understand what’s going on.

Do you think there’s derivation comparison code out there that could
make it into (guix derivations) or similar, with an eye on perhaps
having a CLI derivation comparison tool using the same code in the
future?

> Provide narinfo and nar files for derivations, and the required source
> files ([12] for example). This means the Guix Data Service can be used
> as a substitute server for derivations, for example [13].
>
> 12: http://data.guix.gnu.org/l9kznkzkwj1hilbx39nrnlkpl1s6rxz1.narinfo
> 13: guix build --substitute-urls="http://data.guix.gnu.org https://ci.guix.gnu.org" /gnu/store/l9kznkzkwj1hilbx39nrnlkpl1s6rxz1-hello-2.10.drv

Well done.  :-)

I’m interested in making sure we can share the relevant code between
(guix scripts publish) and the Data Service if that’s not already the
case.

> In particular, I'm still thinking about;
>
>  - Automated code review for Guix patches, which I was working on when I
>    started working on the Guix Data Service, and most of the
>    functionality can be beneficial there.

Yeah, I think at the Guix Days you showed how to take advantage of the
Data Service while reviewing patches; perhaps we should write down a
tutorial or something.

>  - The Guix Weekly News project I was working on recently uses data from
>    the Guix Data Service, and that's what motivated storing the channel
>    news entries.

Yup, that looked nice!  What’s missing, actually?

>  - Trust in builds, once the data about package build reproducibility is
>    more complete, hopefully that will be informative and show where
>    build reproducibility issues can be fixed.
>
>  - Improving the speed in which substitutes are made available.
>
>  - Explaining the data that underpins Guix to a technical audience, like
>    derivations and how they work.

Nice!

Thanks,
Ludo’.