Re: Inverted index to accelerate guix package search

[zimoun]

Hi Ludo,

On Thu, 16 Jan 2020 at 15:46, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:

> > We could build and install the index when Guix is built and installed
> > and then use it for the search.  I can’t think of a downside to adopting
> > an index compared to what we have now.
>
> The possible downsides are (1) ‘guix pull’ will take an additional 8
> seconds, (2) there’ll be some extra complexity because the current
> implementation needs to be kept anyway for when the pre-built index is
> not authoritative—i.e., when ‘GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH’ is set or when ‘-L’ is
> used; see ‘cache-is-authoritative?’ in (gnu packages).

About (1), let implement something experimental and time it to compare
apples with apples. :-)
I mean I am working on it. As said elsewhere, "guix search" could be
improved in different area and the inverted index is an easy first
step, IMHO.

About (2), I have not figured out yet how "guix pull" works and all
the relative folders in ~/.cache/guix.
I will report my issues later. :-)


> I don’t find ‘guix search’ to be excessively slow currently (on an SSD
> at least), but I agree that the speedup would be welcome!

One next step would to search in all the packages and/or services that
"guix time-machine" can manipulate.


Cheers,
simon