Hello Chris,
> Near the beginning of 2020, things changed such that I suddenly had some > time, and some of that time I spend putting idea's I'd had for a while > around building derivations, including across multiple machines, in to > practice [1]. With the Guix Build Coordinator, you made an impressive work, probably based on the observation that the "guix-daemon" and its offloading mechanism was too limited. We are now in a situation where our continuous integration system, while performing better and better is getting out of hand. Here are the different software I'm keeping track of: * Cuirass, deployed on ci.guix.gnu.org * The Guix Build Coordinator, deployed on guix.cbaines.net * The Guix Data Service, deployed on data.guix.gnu.org * Patchwork, deployed on patchwork.cbaines.net All those services have databases, using different DBMS on different servers. Those databases are sometimes overlapping, in the same way as some of the features of those software. In particular I feel that what's implemented in the Guix Build Coordinator can be seen as a subset of Cuirass functionalities. As you know, I'm reluctant to the idea of connecting Cuirass to the Guix Build Coordinator, because most of Cuirass PostgreSQL database content would be duplicated in the SQLite database of the GBC. On the other hand, maintaining those two software in separate ways seems like a huge waste of time given the very limited number of people contributing the maintenance of the CI system. Furthermore, some of the features we are implementing here, should be part of the "guix-daemon" itself, which makes me think that we should not place too much effort in their development. My proposition would be to make a listing of both Cuirass and the GBC features, and see how we could merge them. By maintaining a single software, with a single database, running on the same server, we could spare some efforts, and quickly converge towards a better CI. The new Cuirass architecture and the switch to PostgreSQL, make the software way more modular, and should allow us to add new functionalities without too much trouble. What do you think of that proposition? Thanks, Mathieu
