Re: What's the state of (guix build download-nar)?

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Chris!
>
> Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:
>
>> I guess this raises two things in my mind. I'm not sure this'll work
>> well given the not so recent changes to ci.guix.gnu.org. This module
>> looks to rely on gzipped or uncompressed nars. I'm not sure uncompressed
>> nars are available, and gzipped ones are no longer available.
>>
>> The second question is around the relation to bordeaux.guix.gnu.org, is
>> it worth trying to support fetching nars from bordeaux.guix.gnu.org
>> here, and what would be the best way of doing that? It wouldn't be too
>> hard to add support for decomressed nars I think if that's a good
>> approach?
>
> Uh, that module needs love indeed.
>
> Currently it’s used by some of the (guix VCS-download) modules.  I think
> we should just update to (1) use lzip instead of gzip, and (2) have it
> check ci.guix.gnu.org + bordeaux.guix.gnu.org.

How about using zstd?  I'm proposing it instead of lzip, because long
term, I think we want to reduce the size of our storage requirements and
offer a single compression type for our NARs, which zstd would be ideal
(it's faster and compresses close enough to lzip).

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim