On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 07:43:42PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote: > > Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.cour...@inria.fr> writes: > > > A while back we fantasized about the possibility of having a web service > > that would produce “packs” of Guix packages on demand. That may allow > > us to be #1 on HN for a couple of hours ;-), but it would also be quite > > resource-hungry (and the service itself needs to be written to begin > > with.) Such a service would have to use its own resources IMO, not > > those of the build farm, which is already busy enough. > > My research group was interested in a service just like that, actually. > After having connected the external storage directly to the > berlin.guixsd.org we have a new server that could be used solely for > this purpose.
Demand there is for sure! And these infrastructures are only expanding. > But even this may not be enough for an on-demand service. It might, > however, be enough for a service that regularly builds packs for certain > common environments from packages the build farm has already built. > > (This would be done with the squashfs backend, which is way faster than > the Docker backend.) Also my original comment said to have a limited number of packages to expose. I mean command line tools make sense and dedicated environments. But we don't need an image for every R, Ruby and Python package. We should just compile a meta list of those. And if someone requests one we add it. Pj.
