Re: New blog post on the Guix Build Coordinator: Building derivations, how complicated can it be?

[Christopher Baines]

Vincent Legoll <vincent.legoll@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 8:28 AM Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> wrote:
>> With some prompting, there's now a blog post about the Guix Build
>> Coordinator
>
> Nice post that explains a lot, but I'm still not so sure about the
> relations to cuirass. I'd have liked a small paragraph explaining
> what the differences are, how can they complement each other,
> kind of the CI envisionned big picture...

Thanks for the feedback Vincent :)

I did think about trying to include something about Cuirass, but I don't
have a clear picture of it's scope or purpose, so I'm not really the
right person to attempt to write authoritatively about it.

On a technical level, there's no connection, although there was talk
over the last 6 months or so about trying to have or allow Cuirass to
benefit from the Guix Build Coordinator's ability to perform builds in a
methodical manor across multiple machines. That hasn't happened yet
though, and in the mean time, Cuirass has gained it's own mechanism of
running builds on other machines.

I try to avoid using the CI (Continuous Integration) term as I'm not
sure there's a shared understanding of the term (I think it's the
practice of multiple people frequently merging their changes to some
software they're all working on).

In terms of building things for substitutes, that's one of the use cases
I had in mind when I designed the Guix Build Coordinator, and I think
that design has worked out well, so I'm still interested in trying to
get some benefits for Guix users through using the Guix Build
Coordinator to produce substitutes in a faster and more reliable way.

Does that make any sense? Do say if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Chris

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