RE: good practices in science

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

bijan ghavami-kia <ghavamikia@hotmail.com> writes:

> It’s an interesting prospect, shouldn’t we be working towards this
> fantastical goal?

We (Guix) are already working towards the abstract goal of this project,
because what Guix does is effectively provenance tracking for
computations. Guix' package dependency graph is part of the public
knowledge graph.

If and how we could collaborate with the Underlay in a more
institutional and technical sense is an interesting question to think
about. One ingredient mentioned by Underlay is IPFS, with which Guix has
already made contact. And IPFS is looking into including git
repositories by providing CIDs for Git commits (though this doesn't seem
high-priority task). Guix is already connected to the Software Heritage
archive (two ways: Guix is archived there, and it can work with source
code from the archive), which is basically Git scaled up massively.

All that means that hooking up Guix with the Underlay is a pretty
straightforward endeavor from a technical point of view. It's mainly a
question of all interested parties agreeing on some form of
collaboration. So we are back to politics! Personally I'd love to see
this happen, and I'd definitely be willing to participate actively.

Cheers,
  Konrad