[rb-general] Container-only Linux Distribution

[Ludovic Courtès]

Paul Colomiets <paul at colomiets.name> skribis:

> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org> wrote:

[...]

>> One doesn’t need to run Hydra, the full-blown CI server for this.  It’s
>> enough to simply build things locally.  If they’re in a user profile,
>> they’re protected from garbage collection, so it’s a one-time cost.
>>
>
> Yes, I know, and it makes sense for some cases. But shortly two issues
> with this:
>
> 1. If you publish open-source project, should you also publish nix
> closure? If you join a project, should you take large blob of unknown
> binaries to make a pull request?

For both: You can, but don’t have to.

> 2. If your colleague quits job. Where would you take closure from?

The worst that can happen is you build things locally.

With a binary-transparency style of effort, you could even check that
you get the same results that others obtained before.

>> Guix provides ‘guix publish’ as a lightweight way to publish binaries
>> from your store.  So if there’s a group of people working on the same
>> set of packages, the binaries could effectively be shared this way.
>>
>
> I have not used guix, but it seems even more cumbersome than
> nix-copy-closure. If I publish, then turn of the laptop, my team can't
> get the files.

Sure, I was mentioning it as a lightweight alternative to running Hydra.

> Also nix closures change every so often that it's hard to make sure
> that I my team-mates and a buildbot has very same packages.

You need to make sure you and your teammates are using the same commit
of Nixpkgs or Guix, and from there you know you’ll get the exact same
binaries.

Ludo’.