> 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.

I did a bit of research at the NNCP util and yes, this can be used for
automatic file transfers.
We can create a new udev rule that would trigger nncp when a USB device is
connected. The directories where the files need to be transferred can be
done by creating a config file for NNCP and setting the 'nncpdir' variable
as the desired path. Further customization can be done by altering the nncp
config and udev rules.

I also took a look at the rsync utility which is more widely used but does
not provide features like encryption and compression. Although, it does
have a feature that transfers only the changes within the file instead of
the whole file (better transfer speeds).

Personally, I think nncp is a better choice here as it provides more
features and the tradeoff for using rsync is not that much.

Regards,
Shivam

On Thu, 6 Apr 2023 at 06:55, Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:

>
> 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.
>