Re: A plan for parameterized packages

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 at 12:40, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> > The issue is that despite all that, the size of the images tend to
> > increase too rapidly over time[1].
>
> Yeah, that’s also the problem here: we have ‘guix size’ to profile a
> package at one point in time, but it’s easy to unwillingly increase its
> closure size the next day without noticing.

I think that should be part of the tooling we need to ease the
"release process".  I mean, that's what I have tried to describe as
one starting point at the BoF discussion: tools that help to know how
is the shape of Guix at one point in time (via scripts and repl or via
commands and options) and then time-machine does the rest.

What is currently missing (from my little experience):

  - check reproducibility
  - check size
  - check substitutes per build system, list the "essentials" (the
ones we *absolutly* want to be substituable), maybe per groupes by
topics


> Chris: does the Data Service track store item sizes (and more generally
> everything ‘query-path-info’ returns)?  It’d be great to be able to
> visualize size plots over time!

Yeah, plot could be really useful.


All the best,
simon