Re: Speeding up “guix pull”: splitting modules

[Ludovic Courtès]

BTW, there’s also the “Compute Guix derivation” phase that could be sped
up, and that’s mostly independent of Guile.

Things that could help include: “recursive Nix”¹ (the Guix derivation
would itself be the result of a derivation, thus subject to
substitutes), or something equivalent without special daemon support
where we’d simply embed (guix derivations) & co. to compute the
derivation in memory.

Another less elegant option would be to resort to a service (Data
Service or Cuirass) that would map a Guix commit to its .drv, and then
fetch that .drv from substitute servers and build it.

Finally, we could/should also profile that phase and see what can be
done.

Lastly :-), it would be great to profile this phase over time to see how
it evolves.  (Does the Guix Data Service already stores timings for such
things?)

Ludo’.

¹ https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3205