Re: GitLab to plans to delete dormant projects

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Olivier Dion via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System
distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> skribis:

> On Sat, 06 Aug 2022, Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> wrote:
>> Our build farms need those sources, so they keep them in cache. If you
>> need a source, you can always substitute from the build farms if the
>> origin disappeared (that's actually the default and you don't even
>> need to trust the build farm for that to work).
>
> Does the cache as a time to live?  For example, would a source from 2020 in
> 20 years still be available on the build farms?  Or would the build
> farms make a request to Software Heritage?

Our build farms have limited capacity, so they probably won’t keep
everything forever, but that’s the mission of Software Heritage (SWH).

Guix automatically falls back to SWH for some time now, and SWH
archives all of gitlab.com, so I’m not very concerned:

  https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2019/connecting-reproducible-deployment-to-a-long-term-source-code-archive/

A shortcoming of our code, as Maxime mentions, is that it doesn’t
correctly handle retrieval of recursive checkouts from SWH.  That’s a
bug to fix, and there’s another one in this area:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/48540

> Okay great then.  Maybe it would be a good idea to test this by
> simulating the deletion of a Gitlab repo.  Better find it out now than
> when it's too late.

Other than checking whether ‘guix lint -c archival PKG’ complains, one
can run:

  guix build -S PKG --check

HTH!

Ludo’.