bug#51991: guix deploy with (with build-locally #f) needlessly syncs build artifacts

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello,

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> While configuring a machine setup for building the packages remotely, I
> observed that all substitutes were first retrieved on the local host.
>
> Since the intent is to deploy the remote machine and have it build the
> package itself, this is a wasteful use resources.  The remote machine
> should fetch the or substitutes or package sources itself.

I'm not sure the above is accurate because near the end of deploy it
only transferred a handful of megabytes.  I suspect it needed something
to compute the derivations locally, perhaps grafts?  For example, I have
openjdk installed on the remote machine, and it was downloaded locally
(more than 100 MiB download IIRC), but it was never transferred, if I
followed correctly.

Sorry to write confusing things; I'm a bit confused myself :-).

Thanks,

Maxim