bug#65720: Guile-Git-managed checkouts grow way too much

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Josselin Poiret <dev@jpoiret.xyz> skribis:

> I think using the git binary instead of libgit2 as a workaround is a
> good idea.  We can consider building it directly as well, so that people
> who don't have it in their profiles can still benefit from it.  We could
> even consider using git commands in most places and using libgit2 only
> where we really need the tight coupling.

Surely you’d agree that it would suck though: depending on two Git
implementations because one doesn’t have a proper API and the other one
lacks a bunch of features.

It would also be pretty bad for closure size:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix size guile-git | tail -1
total: 106.6 MiB
$ guix size guile-git git-minimal | tail -1
total: 169.8 MiB
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

It’s also not clear concretely how we’d add that dependency.  Try
invoking ‘git’ from $PATH and print a warning if it doesn’t work?
But then, what about applications like Cuirass and hpcguix-web?

Tricky, tricky.

Ludo’.