Building and caching old Guix derivations for a faster time machine

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Guix,

to me the biggest downside of using “guix time-machine” is that it has
to do a lot of boring work before the interesting work begins.  The
boring work includes building Guix derivations for the given channels,
most of which have long been collected as garbage on ci.guix.gnu.org.

It would be helpful, I think, to more aggressively cache these
derivations and their outputs, and to go back in time and build the
derivatinons for past revisions of Guix.  I would expect there to be a
lot of overlap in the produced files, so perhaps it won’t cost all that
much in terms of storage.

What do you think?

-- 
Ricardo

Re: Enabling contribution through documentation

[Matt]

  On Mon, 06 Nov 2023 23:43:07 +0100 Samuel Christie wrote ---
 >
 > Hello Matt; sorry, I've been distracted and almost missed your reply a few 
 > weeks ago.

Not a problem!  I've been distracted, too.  :)

 > Any thoughts on process? Maybe we could have a repo managed the same way 
 > Guix is, so I can learn that at the same time. (That is, emails for 
 > discussion and patches to the tutorial) How hard would that be to get or set 
 > up?

A central repo makes sense.  I'm open to exchanging patches over email rather 
than doing PRs.

If it's okay with the Guix mailing list, I would be happy to have that exchange 
here so that others may observe, comment, and contribute.

I've set up a repo here: 
https://codeberg.org/excalamus/guix-packaging-tutorial/src/branch/master/guix-packaging-tutorial.org

 > After that, I think the first step is picking an easy but non-trivial 
 > package to do. Maybe it should be one that's already been packaged... I went 
 > through a list of packages that I wished Guix had, and sadly none of them 
 > were easy enough for me to do. My first choice was INN (a Usenet server), 
 > but it has multiple service dependencies I wasn't sure how to handle. My 
 > other choices were apparently in Rust, which always has waaay too many deps. 
 > We could also do a better Hello tutorial. Thoughts?

I think we should do a more detailed Hello tutorial.  It is already referenced 
in the cookbook, it's non-trivial, and this is the use case it was created for. 
 The package definition already exists (gnu/packages/base.scm).

Some words on the document:

I'd like to see the finished tutorial included in the cookbook.  For that, it 
needs to be written in Texinfo.  It's currently in Org.  That's simply what I'm 
most familiar with and the format my notes were in.  Org exports to Texinfo and 
info.  While I'm sure the conversion is imprecise, sticking with Org allows me 
(at least) to write more easily.  It's familiar and generates an (approximate) 
info file.  My intent is to focus on explaining the topic and worry about the 
details of Texinfo later.

Otherwise, Org provides a practical benefit: it embeds "live" source blocks.  
We can run all our shell calls from the document.  My hope is that this will 
keep the source code and shell call snippets accurate.

For anyone unfamiliar with Org, I've heavily annotated the document with 
explanations about how to navigate, edit, and transform it to other formats.  
If that's too much, that's okay.  Just edit the text and we can take care of 
any markup syntax later.

I'm excited to work on this with you and anyone else.  I'm curious what your 
thoughts are :)

GNU Mes 0.25 released

[Janneke Nieuwenhuizen]

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.25!

Although it's been only nine months since the previous release, this
release represents 116 commits over two years by six people.  This
release brings RISC-V64-linux support.

We are excited that the NLnet Foundation is sponsoring this work!

What's next?

Bringing the Full Source Bootstrap to NixOS.  Full Guile compatible
module support, and support for running Gash and Gash-Utils.  Support
for bootstrapping gcc-4.6.4, and a Full Source Bootstrap for
armhf-linux, and riscv64-linux.

Enjoy!

* About

  GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the
  GNU System.  It has helped to decimate the number and size of binary
  seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0.  Recently,
  version 0.24.2 has realized the first Full Source Bootstrap for Guix
  
.
  The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of
  the bootstrappable builds effort  for any
  UNIX-like operating system.

  Mes + MesCC + Mes C Library can build a bootstrappable TinyCC
   that is self-hosting.  Using this
  bootstrappable-tcc and the Mes C library we can build an ancient
  version of the GNU tools triplet: glibc-2.2.5, binutils-2.20.1,
  gcc-2.95.3.  This is enough to bootstrap Guix for i686-linux,
  x86_64-linux, armhf-linux and aarch64-linux.

  Mes was inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5 --
  John McCarthy page 13, Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and
  Jeremiah Orians's Stage0 , a
  ~500-byte self-hosting hex assembler.

* Download

  git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.git

  Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.25.tar.gz
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.25.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.25.tar.gz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.25.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  a0fcd35a32d16580cacb52add632d96eae0548a9  mes-0.25.tar.gz
  325250b3567ed9203ba70161c835af01079e73ebed97b4b5bb77ca500b828940  
mes-0.25.tar.gz

  [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
  .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
  and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify mes-0.25.tar.gz.sig

  If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
  or that public key has expired, try the following commands to update
  or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

gpg --recv-keys 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273

  Alternatively, Mes can be installed or updated using Guix:

guix pull
guix install mes


* Changes in 0.25 since 0.24.2

  ** Core
  *** Support for riscv64-linux.
  ** Build
  *** Support M2-Planet build for x86_64-linux.
  *** Building with M2-Planet-1.11.0 is now supported.
  *** The requirement for M2-Planet's --bootstrap-mode was dropped.
  ** Noteworthy bug fixes
  *** In the REPL, `include', `load', and `,use MODULE' now work.
  *** Using mes' `access' with R_OK now respects read permissions.
  *** On 64bit, displayed values are no longer truncated.
  *** On 64bit, MesCC now correctly supports 8-byte immediate values.
  *** MesCC now initializes struct fields to 0.
  *** The MesCC test suite passes with gcc >= 10
  An array overflow bug was fixed in `63-struct-cell.c'.
  *** Debugging MesCC binaries (function scope) has been resurrected.

Join bug-...@gnu.org and #bootstrappable on irc.libera.chat for
discussions.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

12  Andrius Štikonas
 1  Efraim Flashner
24  Ekaitz Zarraga
 1  Emily Trau
69  Janneke Nieuwenhuizen
15  W. J. van der Laan

-- 
Janneke Nieuwenhuizen   | GNU LilyPond https://LilyPond.org
Freelance IT https://www.JoyOfSource.com | Avatar® https://AvatarAcademy.com


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