Preservation of Guix 2021-10-22

[Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>]

Hey all,

As promised, here is the updated Preservation of Guix Report:

    https://ngyro.com/pog-reports/2021-10-22/

It takes into account the as yet unreleased Disarchive fix.  The results
are quite a bit better!  Note especially that for the most recent
commit, of the 72.8% that I could check, 97.8% are in the SWH archive.

I didn’t add the breakdowns that zimoun suggested (yet), but here is a
bit of extra information.  Of the missing fixed-output derivations, we
have:

    git      376
    tar+gz  3092
    total   3468

If we limit ourselves to the most recent commit (258a27e):

    git      217
    tar+gz    78
    total    295

My guess (and that’s all it is!) is that before “sources.json”, a lot of
tarballs slipped through the cracks.  Now, most of the tarballs are
getting archived via “sources.json”, but since the Git references are
not, there are several that are being missed.

I was curious about the tarballs in the most recent commit, so I took a
look.  There’s no clear pattern.  There were three old GNU packages
(from “commencement.scm”), which I thought was strange, because SWH has
a special GNU loader.  OK, let’s look at Gawk 3.0.0.  It’s there, but
the ID is different.  It turns out the SWH version is missing the
executable bit on all the scripts.  I wonder if they somehow made a
mistake when they first ingested it....  (At least it’s not *another*
Disarchive bug!)


-- Tim