Re: GitLab to plans to delete dormant projects

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

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?

> Another fallback option when substitution is not possible is to get
> the source from Software Heritage. They keep an archive of almost
> everything. To do that, they have listers that help tgem find sources
> fsom different sesvices. They have a lister for GitLab, and even one
> for Guix. Also, as part of guix lint, a request is sert to swh if the
> oriqin is not yet archived.
>
> Hopefully that means our origins are saved by Software Heritage, so we
> can transparently fall back to them.

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.

-- 
Olivier Dion
oldiob.dev