Hello! zimoun <zimon.touto...@gmail.com> skribis:
>> > • 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. > > The main issue is the lookup. Non bit-for-bit archival implies that > people store a SWH lookup key (swhid I guess) at ingestion time, > otherwise it becomes nearly impossible to find back. To me, the > tension is in the meaning of preservation of source code, i.e., > between archiving for reading or archiving for compiling. Exactly, I guess that’s the big difference. Also: allowing archived content to be authenticated by third parties vs. having to trust SWH. > In the case of compilation, all the lookup must be automated and so > non bit-for-bit archival means: make swhid THE standard for > serialization; somehow replacing all the other checksums. Yes, but even if that eventually happens, it’s going to take time. Ludo’.
