Hello!
Here’s a series of improvements that I think we should make in ‘guix
pull’:
• Use Git instead of downloading a whole snapshot every time. The Git
checkout would be kept in ~/.cache/guix/pull/checkouts, say.
A related question is whether to use Git itself, which is pretty big
per ‘guix size’, or to use some libgit2 bindings such as
<https://git.dthompson.us/guile-git.git> (the closure of libgit2 is
435 MiB; that of Git is 761 MiB.)
• Build & install not only Scheme code, but also locales and the Info
manual.
• Have a “channel” mechanism, similar to ‘nix-channel’, that would
allow users to have several Guix variants available in parallel
instead of just “latest”. Could work like this:
guix channel add latest git://git.sv.gnu.org/guix.git master
guix channel add stable git://git.sv.gnu.org/guix.git stable
guix channel pull latest
guix channel set latest
# here i see the latest versions of everything
guix channel set stable
# and here everything is old but super stable ;-)
All 3 items can be done separately, I think.
Any takers? :-)
Ludo’.
PS: I do not mention the issue of authenticating code here, which is
obviously very important and deserves to be treated separately.
Related to that is the question of making sure that what you think
is the latest version really is the latest version. We need someone
to sign certificates saying what the latest commit ID of a repo is.
See the “The Update Framework” paper!
