Call for public review - SWH Nix/GNU Guix stack

[Benoit Chauvet]

Hello,

Regarding the Nix/GNU Guix stack, Software Heritage will soon be ready to support the
ingestion of specific versioned files, tarballs, git, hg, svn source code listed in their respective manifests [1] (as origins). The new lister (and extra loaders, namely {Content|Directory|GitCheckout|SvnExport|HgCheckout}Loader) have been deployed in our staging infrastructure [2].

The initial NixGuix loader (currently in production) lists and loads origins from a manifest, ignoring the specific origins mentioned above. The new stack will be able to ingest those origins. It will also optionally associate, if present, a NAR hash (specific intrinsic identifier to Nix and Guix) to what’s called an ExtID (SWH side).
Regarding the SWH API reading side of the ExtID though is a work to be done.

On staging, we have currently ingested origins that were listed from the GNU Guix manifest [3].

We have already improved the implementations after discussing multiple
limitations encountered along the way with the Guix community [4].

We now would like to have a round of public review on the actual data output of the ingestion process, so we can either  validate or ask for some more updates, and then eventually deploy it in production.

Still, for now, please have a look at some of those origins loaded [3] and let us know what you think!

Thank you for your contributions,

Best regards,

The Software Heritage Team

[1] https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/meta/-/issues/4538

[2] https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/meta/-/issues/4979

[3] https://webapp.staging.swh.network/browse/search/?q=&with_visit=true&with_content=true&visit_type=content

[4] https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/meta/-/issues/37811