[bug#71639] [PATCH WIP 0/5] Improve on restic-backup-service

[Fabio Natali via Guix-patches via <guix-patches@gnu.org>]

Hi Richard and Giacomo.

> >> 1. Improve the restic backup system service [...]
[...]
> Ideally, we'd also move the system tests to 1 so further work can be
> trivially verified by running $ make check-system
> TESTS=restic. That'll require writing an intermediary bootstrapping
> function in the test suite.

+1

> > As a further point, I also think we should manage to update Restic
> > itself to 0.17.0 (while we're still at 0.9.6 which was released in Nov
> > 2019). With such an out-of-date package, the service also risks to loose
> > a little bit of its value.
>
> That would be lovely! One particular feature I'm hopeful for is
> compression support.
>
> Unfortunately restic stopped providing a vendor directory in their
> tarball after 0.9.6 and seemingly has no interest in providing it
> again [1]. Last time I tried guix import with restic I saw some odd
> behavior. Someone with more experience in Go may have better luck.

> [1]: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/3945

Thanks for the link to the Restic's issue tracker. I think it's actually
better to have the dependencies unbundled and built/imported
individually - although this is causing us some pain at the moment.

Some of the 'guix import go --recursive restic' errors seem to be caused
by Go projects using a slightly different subfolder scheme? There seem
to be various open issues (and semi-finalised patches) around this, such
as:

- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/52362
- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/63001
- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/63647
- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/64035
- https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/64036

I'll follow up on one of the threads above and report back here if I
find anything useful.

Thanks, cheers, Fabio.