Re: extend ’guix archive’?

[Jack Hill <jackhill@jackhill.us>]

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On Mon, 20 Dec 2021, zimoun wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 20 Dec 2021 at 23:07, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Regarding nar-herder, I think it’d be nice to have a solution to
>> mirroring in Guix proper, developed similarly to other components,
>> because it could be a fairly central tool.
>>
>> ‘guix publish’ is probably not extensible enough to support that, but we
>> could make it a new ‘guix mirror’ or ‘guix sync’ or whatever command.
>
> Why not extend “guix archive”?

Hi all,

I'm quite interested in learning more and potentially trying out the 
nar-herder! Some thoughts that I'd like to add to the design space:

I think it would be great if one of the pastures to which we herd the nars 
would be a free and open source software mirror site. In my experience, 
these are usually some static web hosting in front of a large disk with a 
place to run scripts to sync the content. A database server may not be 
available. I'd like to support this use case because I think it is a great 
way to build bridges to the communities who run or gather around these 
mirrors.

I'd also like the ability fetch nars directly from the local-to-me mirror 
rather than having them be proxied through a far way server.

One of the things that I really like and find empowering about Guix is 
that the developer/system administration tools are as available, easy to 
use, and convenient as the every day tooling. To the extent possible, I 
think that we should strive to make our syncing/mirroring solution 
practical to run for local, small setups, and not require project-scale 
infrastructure or coordination between many programs that are not captured 
in a Guix service.

Best,
Jack