Can general compute and packaging be more formally merged into a single case?

[Josh Marshall <joshua.r.marshall.1991@gmail.com>]

At the airport, thinking on the fundamental differences between gwl and
guix.  It seems like these can be articulated as the same case when
considering a tracked and linked compute history.

How I see this, when packaging you take checksums off of inputs not for
your own assurance that they are correct (though you could) but to ensure
that under different circumstances another user can be sure that they have
the right starting points.  Then as a matter of storing results and
ensuring the integrity of our results for later we take more checksums.
What we can do is to create a unit computational step of sorts whereby a
user enters a monitored shell whereby they install packages, perform their
work, and produce changes which can be taken to be outputs.  All downloads,
uploads, and files changes tracked.  Then perform a basic minimization
algorithm to reduce the inputs so long as the outputs do not differ.  This
optimized unit computational step can then be tracked with the input
checksums and outputs.  This merges general compute and packaging, then
adding compute power only needs to scale here.

From these, computational chains may also be produced to know a full graph
of what is happening.  Thoughts?