Hello Ricardo,
I greatly agree, it would be an awesome QOL improvement.
Just want to mention that it might be nice to take inspiration from the
Nix dockerTools, since they already have quite a lot of effort put into
this.
Including for example an option called `streamLayeredImage` [1] which
doesn't generate a tarball at all, but rather a script that outputs the
layers without assembling them, in a format which Docker or Podman can
import without the huge intermediary file.
i.e. $(guix pack ...) | docker load
[1]:
https://ryantm.github.io/nixpkgs/builders/images/dockertools/#ssec-pkgs-dockerTools-streamLayeredImage
So that'd allow Guix to skip generating the final tarball altogether,
which makes packing very swift.
Also seems that Nix's way only quickly imports the changed layers? And
Guix's always imports the whole thing, at least I think?
Reading through how they do it, it seems that they pass the raw store
paths to this python script [2] and it does the rest? Save for figuring
out some merging of paths since there's a limit to the number of layers,
I don't think this would be too difficult to port (after we find what
license the script is under at least, or replicate the behaviour in Guile).
[2]:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/90509d6d66eb1524e2798a2a8627f44ae413f174/pkgs/build-support/docker/stream_layered_image.py
What do you think?
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Atlas
