Re: Dropping gzip-compressed substitutes?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello!
>
> I saw in the maintainer meeting minutes the point about substitute
> compression.
>
> Back when zstd substitutes were introduced, the idea was to “eventually”
> drop gzip substitutes (lzip substitutes remain relevant⁰):
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2021-03/msg00333.html
>
> It was too early back then but I think we could consider dropping it
> after 1.4.0 is out, announcing it in advance.

Sounds good to me.

> To those users still running a pre-1.1.0 daemon lacking lzip support¹,
> things will just break, or at least they won’t get newer substitutes.
> It’s been almost 2 years since 1.1.0 was released though.

I’ll admit that back then I had neglected to upgrade the shared daemon
at the MDC, missing the change to different compression types.  A
considerable chunk of the demand for gzip substitutes then could have
been due to the MDC.

Eventually, I did upgrade the shared daemon, so demand should have
dropped significantly.

> But there does seem to be users on foreign distros who never update
> their daemon and don’t read news either.  We could have (guix store)
> warn when it’s talking to an old daemon, which would give people a
> reminder that they need to upgrade.  (That would only work for very old
> daemons because the protocol version rarely changes.)

Printing a warning is a good way to get people’s attention, so I’m all
for it to prepare for the big break.

-- 
Ricardo