Re: Package file indexing

[Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net>]

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Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Hello again!
>
> I'm resurrecting this since I've just started working on this as part of
> the NGI application! :)
>
>>>> Internally it’d call ‘guix substitute’ to fetch the file index from
>>>> the substitute server, check its signature, cache it locally, and then
>>>> look up the file.
>
> What about storing the file listing in the narinfo instead?
> Is this doable?  If so, then it should be quite simple to implement, it
> would basically mimic "guix size."

I haven't followed this thread particularly well, but at least from my
recent experience messing with nar and narinfo stuff in the Guix Data
Service, I'd be cautious about trying to adapt narinfo files for this
purpose.

It seems to me that the narinfo file is a good at capturing the
information about the hash, size, location and signature of the
nar. They're small, and human readable.

I think making information about the contents of Guix store items more
available is great, but even in the average case, it seems like that's
too much information to pack in to a narinfo file. Imagining a manifest
in abstract, having a list of the files and directories as well as the
hashes and sizes of the files could be really useful, but that for most
store items, all that information is much larger than the narinfo
files. A separate file might be more flexible.

Additionally, now that I'm thinking about this, having information about
each store item is great, but if you want to know which store items in a
particular revision of Guix contain files called foo, then it might take
a while to download and search them all. Having something that's focused
around the packages in a channel, and acts as an index for all of the
files in all of the available outputs might be faster to search, by
doing the combining of the data upfront.

Chris

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