George myglc2 Clemmer <myglc2@gmail.com> writes:

> What is the best way to leverage a GuixSD host's store in vm-images?
>
> I am building Guix from Git on a GuixSD host and running vm-images on
> the GuixSD host and "foreign" distros in house.
>
> Should I use 'guix publish' on the host? Helpful hints appreciated ;-)

Hmmm.  I suspect that "guix publish," "guix archive," and "guix copy"
are probably the best options at the moment.  How are you making sure
that each Guix installation is using the same (or almost the same)
version of Guix?  That will be important for maximizing shareability.

Another long shot might be to try offloading, but that's intended more
to distribute the work of running the derivations, rather than
minimizing the amount of builds that need to happen.  If host A needs to
build derivation X, host B has not built X, host C has built X, and A
arbitrarily decides to offload to B, then B will waste time building X
when A could have just gotten it directly from C.  For a small number of
nodes, I suppose it's conceivable that it might help on average...but it
might just as well eat up all your CPU and network bandwidth, too.  :-)

If only substitutes published via "guix publish" were discoverable via
mDNS!  Then it would be easier to share within the same network, without
going through the tedium of configuring all the hosts individually...

-- 
Chris