Re: Preservation of Guix (PoG) report 2023-03-13

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Mar 2023 at 19:37, Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com> wrote:

> Note that you can link to the most recent version of the report using
> <https://ngyro.com/pog-reports/latest/>.

Awesome! \o/

Well, I do not remember if you consider also the ’origin’
(fixed-outputs) as ’inputs’ or ’patches’.  Do you?

Basically, ’package-direct-sources’ from (guix packages).

For instance, see the package ’ntp’,

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(source
     (origin
       (method url-fetch)
       (uri (list (string-append
                   "https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ntp_spool/ntp4/ntp-";
                   (version-major+minor version)
[...]
       (sha256
        (base32 "06cwhimm71safmwvp6nhxp6hvxsg62whnbgbgiflsqb8mgg40n7n"))
       ;; Add an upstream patch to fix build with GCC 10.  Taken from
       ;; <https://bugs.ntp.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3688>.
       (patches (list (origin
                        (method url-fetch)
                        (uri "https://bugs.ntp.org/attachment.cgi?id=1760\
&action=diff&context=patch&collapsed=&headers=1&format=raw")
                        (file-name "ntp-gcc-compat.patch")
                        (sha256
                         (base32
                          
"13d28sg45rflc7kqiv30asrhna8n69wlpwx16l65rravgpvp90h2")))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

or see the package ’tensorflow’,

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
    (native-inputs
     `(("pkg-config" ,pkg-config)
[...]
       ("boringssl-src"
        ,(let ((commit "ee7aa02")
               (revision "1"))
           (origin
             (method git-fetch)
             (uri (git-reference
                   (url "https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl";)
                   (commit commit)))
             (file-name (string-append "boringssl-0-" revision
                                       (string-take commit 7)
                                       "-checkout"))
             (sha256
              (base32
               "1jf693q0nw0adsic6cgmbdx6g7wr4rj4vxa8j1hpn792fqhd8wgw")))))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---


> Over the whole set, 77.1% are known to be safely tucked away in the
> Software Heritage archive.  But it’s actually much better than that.  If
> we only look at the most recent sampled commit (from Sunday the 5th),
> that number becomes 87.4%, which is starting to look pretty good!

Just to be point the new nixguix loader [1] is still in SWH staging and
not yet deployed, IIRC.  It will not change much the coverage on our
side but it should be fix some corner-cases.

1: <https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/meta/-/issues/4662>


>      This is kinda like an automated version of Simon’s recent
> investigation.

Neat!  Note that I also wanted to check the SWH capacity for cooking,
not only checking the end points.  For instance, it allowed to discover
mismatch due to uncovered CR/LF normalization; now fixed with:
58f20fa8181bdcd4269671e1d3cef1268947af3a.


> Here’s a rough road map for that based on a glance at the script’s
> output:
>
>     • Subversion support (for TeX-based documentation stuff, I guess)

For the interested reader, details for helping in the implementation:

    https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/43442#9
    https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/43442#11

However, it would ease all the dance if SWH would consider to store and
expose NAR hashes on their side.  As discussed here:

    https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/meta/-/issues/4538


>              However, 42% of them are old Bioconductor packages.  They
> seem to be lost.  It looks like Bioconductor now stores multiple package
> versions per Bioconductor version [2], but before version 3.15 that was
> not the case.  As an example, take “ggcyto” from Bioconductor 3.10 [3].
> We packaged version 1.14.0, and then at some point Bioconductor 3.10
> switched to version 1.14.1.  We packaged that, too, but now 1.14.0 is
> gone.

Well, I have not investigated much because it is between December 2019
and March 2020 thus “guix time-machine” is not smooth for this old time.

First question, does we have the source tarball in Berlin or Bordeaux or
somewhere else?  If yes, there is a hope. :-) Else, it is probably gone
forever.

The hope is: https://git.bioconductor.org/packages/ggcyto

If we have the tarball with the correct checksum from commit
f5f440312d848e12463f0c6f7510a86b623a9e27

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
+    (version "1.14.0")
+    (source
+     (origin
+       (method url-fetch)
+       (uri (bioconductor-uri "ggcyto" version))
+       (sha256
+        (base32
+         "165qszvy5z176h1l3dnjb5dcm279b6bjl5n5gzz8wfn4xpn8anc8"))))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

then we can disassemble it and then using the Git repository, we can try
to assemble the content from SWH and the meta from Disarchive DB.

For sure, it is again another example why we should augment by intrinsic
identifiers the Guix way for fetching.  See:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-03/msg00025.html


>        I know it’s been discussed before, but I can’t remember what the
> conclusion was.  Are these just gone forever?

Discussed here:

    https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/39885
    https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/54787    



Cheers,
simon