Re: Guix to participate in the Google Summer of Code

[Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com>]

Hello Ricardo,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Hi Alex,
>
>> I want to be a student this year since this will be my final chance (I
>> am graduating this year). I look at the libreplanet page and I think
>> only the build daemon project is suitable for me since I don't have
>> knowledge in networking. Is it possible for me to work on last-year
>> Bournish project?
>
> The Bournish project is poorly defined now that gash exists, a Bash
> interpreter written in Guile.  It wouldn’t be a lot of work to integrate
> gash into Guix and replace Bournish; in fact I wanted to do this myself
> in a few weeks.
>
OK, so we already have a working Bash interpreter written in Guile. It
makes sense to drop the old plan then.

> I’m afraid that the Bournish project would no longer be suitable for
> GSoC, and that’s why it had been removed from the list of project ideas.
>
I see. So this is why I think I have seen it before. It was on the list
of idea but then get removed.

> The guix-daemon project is larger but also much more useful to us.
> Garbage collection in the context of Guix is not very difficult to
> understand.  The garbage collector may remove any item that has zero
> users; the link count on a store item is indicative of the number of
> users that item has.  For garbage collection you essentially go through
> all items and check if the link count is zero.
>
I will join the guix-daemon project then. My understading is that the
garbage collector also uses info from 'list-runtime-roots', right? So
together we have registered roots and runtime roots.

> The reference scanner is already implemented in the form of grafts.  The
> code opens each file and searches efficiently for store references.
>
Does this mean we have procedure to do a single find-reference and the
remaining work is to build a recursive find-reference?

> For that project it is best to spend a day or two browsing the existing
> Guile sources and noting the many things that already implement large
> parts of the daemon features.
>
> --
> Ricardo
>
> GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
> https://elephly.net

Cheers,
Alex