Re: Linux-libre source code will be taken offline

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 28 Sept 2021 at 01:34, Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> wrote:

> Of course, adding this to the list of URIs in linux-libre-deblob-scripts
> won't help users of old Guix revisions... Software Heritage and other
> archives that support content-addressed lookups are the only solution
> for that.

I do not know how Software Heritage (SWH) handles this case.
Especially for these deblob scripts.  For informatio, the current
status* about SWH is:

  - all the git-fetch packages are "saved" by running manually "guix
lint -c archival" or click to the Save Button on SWH webpage. :-)
  - (almost) all the url-fetch are ingested by SWH using the
guix.gnu.org/sources.json

The content-adressed lookup works fine for Git repo (from channel to
package).  However, it is not ready yet for tarballs.  In short, at
package time, we have a checksum which is content+metadata; then SWH
archives only the content and drops the metadata; and this content is
content-addressed using SWH-ID.  At fallback time, the knowlegde of
checksum does not guarantee to be able to lookup for the content.  And
even if it happens, SWH does rebuild the exact same tarball (because
of the metadata drops), i.e., there is a high probably to have a
checksum mismatch somehow.

Therefore, here it is the aime of Disarchive.  It somehow builds this
map between the checksum and the SWH content-addressed content.

Bricks are there but missing glue. :-)

*current status about SWH: if I have not missed a recent feature. ;-)


An improvement is done by the patch to add these computed origins to
sources.json; see here:

<http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/50515>

and this patch is blocked by missing comment on this one:
<http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/50620>.

However, if now upstream removed the material, bah it is another story
to save this very same material to SWH. :-)

All the best,
simon