[bug#68677] [PATCH 0/6] Service for "virtual build machines"

[Suhail via Guix-patches via <guix-patches@gnu.org>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Any comments on this patch series?

I don't have comments regarding the code, but I do have a couple of
questions and a comment.  Please excuse my limited understanding of GNU
Shepherd and Guix System.  None of the questions/comments below are
deal-breakers in my opinion.

1. The documentation references GNU Shepherd.  Is GNU Shepherd a hard
   requirement in order to use the facilities provided by the patch
   series?  Would it be possible to use, say, Systemd on a foreign
   distribution?  If so, could examples of those be documented in the
   appropriate place as well?

2. The code sets the default date to be 2020-01-01; does this date have
   any significance?  It might help for the code to have a comment
   explaining whether this value is completely arbitrary or whether it
   has some significance.  On a related note, it might help for the
   documentation to note dates that are less likely to work (in case
   values before a certain time aren't expected to be well supported).

Additionally, I'm not sure if this belongs in the manual or in the
cookbook (or elsewhere), but it would be helpful to have some small, but
complete, examples.  The documentation in the patch series mentions two
situations (time traps, and CPU microarchitecture optimizations) and for
each it would be helpful to have a self-contained full working example
referenced.  For the "time trap" use-case, perhaps one of the
submissions from the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge could be used.

-- 
Suhail