Using gitlab-ci to maintain a channel?

[Hartmut Goebel]

Hi,

I wonder whether it's possible to maintain a channel using gitlab-ci. Any thought or experiences to share?

My idea is to schedule jobs which are refreshing the packages, building/testing them and to provide substitutes.

The channel is meant for Tryton (tryton.org), which consists of about 200 plug-in packages and bug-fixes are published for the LTS version every now and then. The channel should follow these bug-fix releases. Tryton is pure Python, anyhow some dependencies require C, C++ and even rust for building, updating dependencies should be avoided if not all substitutes for all dependencies are available (or maybe deny-list specific dependencies).

The points I'm wondering are:

• What version of guix shall be used? Always the latest one?
  
• The runners need a docker image. Where to I get one? Possibly containing a warmed-up cache? (Using a Debian docker image and installing guix into it on every run sounds like a bad idea.)
  
• OTOH /gnu/tore could be cached. How much data would this typically be?
  
• How to clean the cache from unreachable items?
  
• How to publish the substitutes?
  

Why gitlab-ci? Well, the channel will live on a gitlab instance, thus using that infrastructure would simplify things and avoid single users managing processes.

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |