Re: Preservation of Guix report for 2024-01-26

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Timothy!

Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com> skribis:

> The permalink is https://ngyro.com/pog-reports/2024-01-26, but you can
> link to the latest report, too: https://ngyro.com/pog-reports/latest/.

Yay!

> New in this edition is checking for Subversion sources and
> bzip2-compressed tarballs.  Subversion is well covered (98.5%), since it
> is basically asking, “is TeX Live in SWH?”.  The bzip2 sources are
> similar to other compressed tarballs.

Thumbs up on bzip2 support!  We should update Disarchive in Guix but
perhaps that’s already in your pipeline?  We’ll also have to sync the
disarchive.guix.gnu.org with ngyro.com.

How did you implement the Subversion check?

Until the recent addition of ‘nar-sha256’ ExtIDs¹, my understanding is
that there was no way to check whether a Subversion revision (and
actually, a specific sub-directory checkout) was in SWH.

¹ https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68741

>   Some of these (I didn’t check them all) are in SWH as content rather
>   than directories.  That’s kinda good, because Guix knows how to get
>   them, but also kinda mysterious.  I’ve asked swh-devel about it.
>   Depending on the answer, I might have to adapt the checks to deal with
>   the possibility of SWH having the tarball rather than its contents.
>   In fact, that might be an improvement either way, but it muddies the
>   data model quite a bit.

Back in the day, they told me that tarballs can sometimes be ingested,
for instance if they are committed to a VCS repo (that’s why our
fallback code tries that as well).  Maybe that’s what happened?

> The short-term road map for this is to send the historical sources to
> SWH and fix the Ruby gems, and then make a new report.  So expect a
> minor update with much better numbers soon-ish.

Awesome.

> The long-term road map is to make it work like an archive.  It will run
> continuously and store *all* Guix sources.  To make this easy data-wise,
> it will only store what’s not covered by SWH.

By “it”, you mean the Disarchive DB?

Thanks for the exciting news!

Ludo’.