Re: Status of armhf-linux and powerpc64le-linux

[Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org>]

Hey,

> How frequently does that machine become unreachable?
>
> Its uptime right now is “only” 51 days, but it seems to have been
> reliably building things so far (surprisingly so!).

Oh so it must be available from the Cuirass point of view but not from
the guix offload point of view. I'll try to fix it today.

> In Cuirass, we should arrange to support partial evaluations or
> per-system evaluations so that a single missing offload machine doesn’t
> cause the whole evaluation to fail.

We can define a guix specification for x86_64-linux, i686-linux and
aarch64-linux and a different one for powerpc64le-linux. That can be
done really quickly. That can break some mechanisms relying on the fact
that the guix specification name is "guix" though.

> That’s radical, but maybe that’s the most reasonable option.
>
> How about a plan like this: until next Thursday, we try to address the
> infrastructure issues discussed above to estimate feasibility.  Then we
> decide on the way forward.  WDYT?

Alright, let's try that :). I agree that it is a pity not to release for
those architectures but on the other hand, we cannot offer fresh
substitutes reliably for them.

The recent outages of ci.guix.gnu.org have shown once again that the
infrastructure is maybe one of the most important Guix aspect. Without
it, Guix is almost unusable, in particular on architectures for which
it's hard to find powerful hardware.

Given the limited amount of people willing to help for
powerpc64le-linux and armhf-linux and the limited amount of hardware
resources available for those, I think it could be reasonable to focus
on a smaller set of architectures and provide stronger guarantees on
those in term of substitutes availability.

But let's discuss that again next week depending on our progress.

Thanks,

Mathieu