Re: Avoid sending sources to offload servers

["Simen Endsjø" <contact@simendsjo.me>]

Yes, but it is very cumbersome. I can no longer just "reconfigure" my home or system, but have to manually to a build for all packages with the correct parameters first.
Same for guix shell; I'd have to first split them into "with offload" and "without offload".

I guess what I would like is at least that the sources for the builds to be downloaded by the build server instead of transferred by my system. But this might be a side effect of sources being built as store items? So it's a dependency for the build, and passed to the build server so it doesn't have to compute it? Maybe having a size limit for passing to the build server could be a solution. If an item is greater than the threshold, the build server will compute it.

On Thu, Nov 7, 2024, at 12:00, Edouard Klein wrote:
> I may be mistaken, but you I think you can run guix build a with
> offloading, and guix build b c without, then when you run guix shell, a,
> b, and c will all be in your store and won't need to be rebuilt.
> 
> 
> Simen Endsjø <contact@simendsjo.me> writes:
> 
> > Yes, that's what I'm using, but it's not granular. The problem is things like `guix shell a b c`.
> > - a has a small source and long build time
> > - b has a large source and short build time
> > - c has a large output
> >
> > a is no problem to offload, but b will cause a lot of unnecessary traffic, and I might want to run c locally to to avoid passing a lot of data.
> >
> > I cannot tell --no-offload skip b and c, so If I have a single problematic package in my system, home or in a guix shell, I have to disable offloading for all packages.
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 7, 2024, at 10:14, Hilton Chain wrote:
> >> Hi Simen,
> >>
> >> On Thu, 07 Nov 2024 16:57:26 +0800,
> >> Simen Endsjø wrote:
> >> >
> >> > I notice package sources are sent to offload servers. I have a build that has
> >> > 1.9GB sources, and results in a 4.7GB store item. I would have thought only the
> >> > definitions were sent to the build machine, and it would download the 1.9GB
> >> > file, but it seems this file is sent from my machine. I cannot see a way around
> >> > this, and it makes it difficult to combine this package with packages I wish to
> >> > offload as I cannot state certain packages shouldn't be offloaded.
> >> >
> >> > Not sure what I'm asking here, just wanted to point out an issue which causes
> >> > problems.
> >>
> >> Guix commands that can spawn builds have a ‘--no-offload’ option, you can see
> >> more these options here[1].
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >> ---
> >> [1]: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Common-Build-Options.html
> >>
>