Hello Guix! I had the pleasure to attend the Software Heritage fifth anniversary event yesterday at the UNESCO headquarters (fancy!) and at Inria in Paris.
I learned about things others are doing with SWH (notably in the cultural and scientific fields) and had discussions with hackers (people who work on Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and Bazaar “loaders”, for instance). I gave a 10–15mn talk on how Guix uses SWH, what Disarchive is, what the current status of the “preservation of Guix” is, and what remains to be done: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/talks/swh-unesco-2021/talk.20211130.pdf (There was a great talk about Maneage¹ right before mine.) I chatted with the SWH tech team; they’re obviously very busy solving all sorts of scalability challenges :-) but they’re also truly interested in what we’re doing and in supporting our use case. Off the top of my head, here are some of the topics discussed: • ingesting past revisions: if we can give them ‘sources.json’ for past revisions, they’re happy to ingest them; • rate limit: we can find an arrangement to raise it for the purposes of statistics gathering like Simon and Timothy have been doing (we can discuss the details off-list); • Disarchive: they’d like to better understand the “unknowns” in the PoG plots (I wasn’t sure if it was non-tar.gz tarballs or what) and to work on the definitely-missing origins that show up there; they’re not opposed to the idea of eventually hosting or maintaining the Disarchive database (in fact one of the developers thought we were hosting it in Git and that as such they were already archiving it—maybe we could go back to Git?); • bit-for-bit archival: there’s a tension between making SWH a “canonical” representation of VCS repos and making it a faithful, bit-for-bit identical copy of the original, and there are different opinions in the team here; our use case pretty much requires bit-for-bit copies, and fortunately this is what SWH is giving us in practice for Git repos, so checkout authentication (for example) should work even when fetching Guix from SWH. There were other discussions about Guix and Nix and I was pleased to see people were enthusiastic about functional package management and about our whole endeavor. Anyway I think we can take this as an opportunity to increase bandwidth with the SWH developers! Thanks, Ludo’. ¹ https://maneage.org/
