Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org> writes:

>> I like Chris Baines’ idea of decoupling nar distribution from nar
>> building.  If we want to keep nars long enough so that ‘time-machine’ is
>> usable, then storage requirements will keep growing.
>>
>> Perhaps that means we can regularly copy nars “elsewhere” for long-term
>> storage, using nar-herder, rsync, or whatever.  The machine that stores
>> nars long-term has low requirements compared to the build farm because
>> we don’t need to trust it for anything other than storage.  If that
>> makes things easier (and financially viable), a VPS is good enough.
>
> Sure, the VPS would also allow us to have a less European-centric
> hosting. I did not follow closely the development of the
> nar-herder. Chris what improvements this tool would bring compared to a
> rsync based approach?

There's some discussion of this in the README [1].

1: https://git.cbaines.net/guix/nar-herder/about/

I think the short answer for the moment though is the nar-herder doesn't
do anything that you couldn't do with rsync.

I jumped straight in with Guile+SQLite rather than using rsync+files
because I think the performance for various operations will scale better
this way, and it'll lead on to more advanced functionality, like doing
GC like operations, metrics and tagging nars.