bug#35551: guix search

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Bruno,

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> Mark H Weaver wrote:
>> If we add functionality that calls out to the network in response to a
>> package search, e.g. to query popularity ratings or package file
>> listings, we should make sure the user knows it's happening, and provide
>> a way to disable it.  Some users may not want information about their
>> package searches to be leaked to the outside world.
>
> Good point.
>
> Would it be more acceptable, upon 'guix search', to download an incremental
> update of a package popularity database, and do the search locally? This
> way, only the fact that the user has been doing a 'guix search' would be
> leaked to the outside world, not the search term.

Yes, that would address my concerns, although popularity ratings might
be compact enough and change slowly enough that it might be sufficient
to simply have them embedded in the Guix source code and manually
updated periodically.

Popularity ratings would also be useful to set build priorities on our
build farms.

The package file listings, on the other hand, are likely to be so large
that it's not practical to download an incremental update of all of
them.

      Thanks,
        Mark