Re: Hello GUIX

[Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net>]

Shivam Madlani <shivammadlani5@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks a lot for the feedback!!
>
>>  Reading from a disk maybe should happen automagically if it can be
>>  detected (and is enabled in some configuration). This might also
>>  require some integration with udisks. The complexity of this should
>>  not be underestimated.
>
> We can set it up in such a way that on running `guix install {xyz}` it will first check for mounted drives in /media
> directory and install {xyz} if it's present in the drive. 
>
>> Writing packages to a USB stick seems to be closer to a `guix
>>  publish` or `guix deploy`. Maybe you can read up on those commands
>>  and think of a nice way to publish or deploy a set of packages to a
>>  USB stick. This is also relevant for publishing to other p2p
>>  networks (IPFS, GNUnet, etc.).
>
> Perhaps, We can introduce a new utility? (maybe something like `guix sneak`). This will scan for external drives
> and on detecting a drive it will encode and store the nars into it.
> The size of the drive can cause an issue here in case the content to be encoded is very large. In this case an
> appropriate error message will be displayed. Although this is rare as flash drives/hard drives have a lot of storage
> capacity these days but it's still a thing to consider.
>
> Another way would be to use `guix publish` itself to do all of this. We can introduce a flag `--sneak` which instead
> of spawning an HTTP server, encodes and stored into the drive. But i don't think we should modify an already
> existing utility for this. I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

The NNCP utility might be worth taking a look at.  There is a way to set
it up alongside udev to automatically transfer files from connected USB
storage.