bug#47846: Feature Request: Add ability to disable having cache or generations

[Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at>]

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 18.04.2021, 18:45 +0000 schrieb bo0od:
>  > My bad, I meant to type 500GB (a fairly common disk size), but it
> turns
>  > out my other laptop survives quite fine on 250.  Fair enough, it's
> not
>  > 32GB (common in phones), but then again, you'd run normally very
>  > different packages on embedded systems.
> 
> yeah 100+ GB thats too big, not always having this space is easy or 
> available.
It is common enough for desktop PCs and laptops, which is the use case
I'm talking about here.  If you're hosting a server, chances also are,
that you have that much, if not more space available.  For cases, in
which you have significantly less memory available, there is a bare-
bones template.

>  > There are several ways of optimizing for profile size, one of
> which is
>  > to not run huge browsers like icecat.  I have no idea what kind of
>  > system you're trying to fit into 20GB , but a hard idea thinking
> it's
>  > the right kind.
> 
> I have debian,fedora,kali,ubuntu,trisquel/triskel,arch... all with
> only 
> 20GB space and working for testing purposes as im mostly working as 
> software tester.
I'm fairly certain you should be able to get test environments, that
fit this size via `guix environment', but if that's your plan, you
shouldn't do much else with the space you have.  Might I ask if you're
the kind to keep a separate /home?

>  > What kind of advanced removal strategies are you talking about?
> 
> I didnt suggested how its done in my ticket, I gave the issue and 
> feature request as a solution to it but how to do it the best way i 
> leave this to the devs to decide not me.
"Please remove all my previous stuff whenever I upgrade a package" is a
rather specific feature request in my opinion.  I don't think there is
much room for bikeshedding different implementations of it, though of
course, Debian, Arch, Gentoo etc. are all different distributions, that
produce it as a side-effect of what they're actually trying to do.

> If out of ideas and nothing is available look at other distributions
> and 
> see how its done and what can be taken from them and merge into guix
> to 
> adopt this feature.
How did other distributions "adopt this feature" in your opinion?

Regards,
Leo