Re: wishlist: “repack” generations history of profile

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Am Freitag, dem 20.05.2022 um 15:47 +0200 schrieb zimoun:
> Hi,
> 
> [...]
> Now, assume I am running out of space.  If I run,
> 
>     guix gc --delete-generations=2m
> 
> then I am removing the items in the store (data) and also the meta
> data (manifest, date, channels, etc.).
> 
> I am fine to delete the old items in the store.  I do not want to
> keep things I am not using.  However, for tracking and monitoring, I
> would like to still keep these meta and potentially be able to
> rebuild such generation.
> 
> The question is what to do when we delete?
> 
> I am proposing to delete the content, i.e., all but keep the meta,
> i.e., the file manifest.  We could have an option soft (keep meta)
> and hard (remove all, meta included, as today) for guix gc.
> [...]
> WDYT?
I think we should implement this as a single --keep=stuff operator,
where stuff can be a comma-separated list.  In your case, I think the
stuff you wanted to keep were the profile manifests, but you could as
easily say that you want to keep all the .drv files and only drop the
store items.  With some fantasy, we could even add "essentials", which
would be git-minimal and other packages that are native inputs in the
building of guix itself.

I'm not so sure if I understand the generation bit correctly, but with
the switch proposed above, you'd --keep=generations, which keeps just
enough data to make switch-generation work "lazily".

WDYT?