Re: Docker and singularity containers

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> writes:

> A while back we fantasized about the possibility of having a web service
> that would produce “packs” of Guix packages on demand.  That may allow
> us to be #1 on HN for a couple of hours ;-), but it would also be quite
> resource-hungry (and the service itself needs to be written to begin
> with.)  Such a service would have to use its own resources IMO, not
> those of the build farm, which is already busy enough.

My research group was interested in a service just like that, actually.
After having connected the external storage directly to the
berlin.guixsd.org we have a new server that could be used solely for
this purpose.

But even this may not be enough for an on-demand service.  It might,
however, be enough for a service that regularly builds packs for certain
common environments from packages the build farm has already built.

(This would be done with the squashfs backend, which is way faster than
the Docker backend.)

--
Ricardo