[Nix-dev] fetchgit vs tarball creation, privately maintained infrastructure

[Florian Friesdorf]

I messed up Subject and Cc m( Now, with Marc's permission publicly.

My original mail:
> Hi Marc,
> 
> there are currently several expressions pointing to your server
> resulting in 404s.
> 
> Why do you prefer to put sources on your private server instead of
> public infrastructure?
> 
> Maybe we can keep the benefits and still profit from assumed higher
> availability of public infrastructure.
> 
> regards
> florian


On Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:19:55 +0200, Marc Weber <marco-oweber at gmx.de> wrote:
> (..)
> I haven't had time to recover. Tell me the target packages and I'll
> upload everything required to build them.

see the attached file

> Why don't I use fetchgit etc? Cause its too slow. My internet is slow.
> I need incremental updates. That's why I wrote nix-repository-manager
> to serve my needs.

To solve that I would rather teach fetchgit to keep a cache of its
repositories, instead of creating tarballs. Many things I install via
fetchgit, I anyway want to have on my laptop for development. Having one
common cache from which fetchgit for nix and you for development can
clone.

Anyway, I think nix expressions should not depend on anybody's private
infrastructure, but instead use public infrastructure.

> > Why do you prefer to put sources on your private server instead of
> > public infrastructure?
> > Maybe we can keep the benefits and still profit from assumed higher
> > availability of public infrastructure.
> I'm planing to put my stuff on amazon. I can't afford huge build farms.
> But being able to launch some nice CPU powered instances on Amazon will
> allow to me provide binaries for my branches.

I don't think its necessary that you provide your own hosting
infrastructure for that.

> Currently my tool supports pushing tars by SSH. It should be doable to
> make it cope with any public infrastructure. Which one do you suggest?

I would not like to see packages use that approach without agreement
that we in nix are generating tarballs for things available via
git/svn/...

I think the approach of caching is more fruitful. If we agree to create
tarballs instead of fetching git, there is some good reason for it and
those tarballs should be hosted on nix infrastructure, i.e. making it a
solution used by every package maintainer.

> If you want to join tell me. A lot of my patches did never get any
> review. And committing them without "ok" was no good according to ludo
> either. That's why I had to fork (also because SVN is too slow for me).

I'd happy to review isolated patches implementing functionality I'm
interested in.

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Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net>
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