bug#42162: gforge.inria.fr to be taken off-line in Dec. 2020

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> Euh, I do not understand.  From bug#43442 [1] on Wed, 16 Sep 2020,
> Scotch was not missing.  And from [2] neither.
>
> Nah, the hole is the (double) update (from 6.0.6 to 6.1.0 then 6.1.1)
> without manually taking care of this bug report; by switching from
> url-fetch to git-fetch for instance.  Somehow, it was bounded to happen
> because we lack automatic tools despite the fact they are there.
>
> Indeed, hard to believe. :-)

I guess, in our mind, the problem was fixed long ago.  :-)

> As I am asking in this thread [3], the Guix project has the ressource,
> storage speaking, to archive these tarballs -- waiting a robust
> long-term automatic system.  But we (the Guix projet) cannot because we
> duplicate the effort on keeping twice all the build outputs.  Somehow,
> between Berlin and Bordeaux, coherent policies for conservancy are
> missing. IMHO.

So I think we’re lucky that we can try different solutions at once.

The best solution is the one that won’t rely solely on the Guix project:
SWH + Disarchive.  We’re getting there!

The second-best solution is to improve our tooling so we can actually
keep source code in a more controlled way.  That’s what I had in mind
with <https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/source>.  We have storage space for
that on berlin, but it’s not infinite.

Another approach is to use ‘git-fetch’ more, at least for non-Autotools
packages (that’s the case for Scotch, for instance.)

So we can do all these things, and we’ll have to push hard to get the
Disarchive option past the finish line because it’s the most promising
long-term.

Thanks,
Ludo’.