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, 14:40 +0000 schrieb bo0od:
>  > There is no active caching going on.
> 
> Not sure what do you mean by this.
Exactly what I said.  There is a philosophical difference between a
store, that keeps items as long as there's a referrer and a cache,
which keeps some items on a heuristic basis.

>  > but on a desktop with 500MB storage, you can keep several
> months of that around if you want to.
> 
> Im using 20GB+9GB swap, its nightmare you cant just upgrade without
> each 
> and everytime delete cache. So no, Sorry The statement isnt accurate 
> about 500MB. (my personal experience, not someone telling me nor 
> guessing things)
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.

And yeah, this is also personal experience, not someone telling me or
guessing, I merely made a typo.

> 
>  > Which is bad how?
> 
> Imagine i upgraded to FF version 79, but as well i have
> 78.9.2,78.9.0... 
> These are wasted software we are not hunting deer and keeping
> trophies, 
>   Dont get me wrong roll back is great/usable but not for 
> everyone/everytime case.
You do know, that Guix also has environments, that can be garbage
collected, as soon as the process exits, right?  If you use Icecat so
rarely, that upgrading it along with the rest of your profile makes no
sense, you could use those.  Not to mention w.r.t. security, using a
containerized icecat is probably a better idea.

>  >Just FYI deleting all that so often only puts unnecessary stress on
> your disk, because native inputs will have to be redownloaded and
> you're not even freeing up that much space.
> 
> There is no way i can upgrade without using them.
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.

By the way, continuing from before, my /run/current-system, which
consists of the desktop template plus some extras, seems to weigh just
about 2GB, which would fit 5 times into 20GB while still letting me use
half of the disk.

>  > That's not very functional.  Again, you're putting more stress on
> your
> hardware by actively asking it to remove stuff.
> 
> If you mean by the method of removing, Thats not my job to know what
> is 
> the best method to be used, There are main distros like 
> debian,fedora..etc devs can look at them and see how they can 
> adopt/merge some methods.
What kind of advanced removal strategies are you talking about?
Traditional distros do not face this issue, because they're more or
less just dumping files into already existing locations, and don't
really worry whether something already exists there.  (Well, there are
varying degrees of worrying, but they are all incomplete.)  Binary
distros have it even easier, because they don't even attempt to build
from source (another issue if you're running a resource-constrained
device).

These so-called "removal methods" of traditional distros are
antithetical to Guix' design.  Asking us to behave just like a "main
distro", when we have made a clear decision not to, is not going to
please either side of the discussion.

Regards,
Leo