Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add r-edger.

[Roel Janssen]

Efraim Flashner writes:

> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 09:33:28AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> 
>> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 09:36:28AM +0200, Roel Janssen wrote:
>> >> * gnu/packages/bioinformatics.scm (r-edger): New variable.
>> >
>> > I tried to build this (and limma), but the source tarball is no longer
>> > available. I couldn't find any archived releases on the bioconductor
>> > site.
>> 
>> Yes, this is a very annoying problem with Bioconductor.  I’m not sure
>> but I think this has been raised on the Bioconductor mailing lists some
>> months ago.  There is no archive at the moment.
>> 
>> All previous releases might still be available via SVN, though, so maybe
>> we can find a way to generalise this and add an SVN origin as a
>> fallback.  Maybe we should not use the tarballs at all and convert all
>> of the Bioconductor packages to use SVN instead?
>> 
>
> It would be easier than making our own archive of releases or
> systematically uploading them all to archive.org.

I've encountered missing tarballs a couple of times now.  I think it would
make Guix more "complete" to add an option to consistently store source
tarballs, so they can be backed up somewhere.

We could integrate this with the substitutions infrastructure, or create a
separate component that works kind of like this:

If could add an option to export source tarballs from the store to a
custom directory that maintains the structure:
<dir>/<sha256-hash>-<name>-<version>.<extension>, then we could easily set
up a web server with <dir> as webroot.

Then all we have to do is "trust" the webserver that serves the
tarballs, which can be done in a similar way as trusting a substitution
server.

This can be completely automated, so I don't think it has to be a lot of
work:
1. guix package --export-source-tarballs=/var/www/public_html/
2. rsync /var/www/public_html/ address@hidden:/var/www/public_html/

Kind regards,
Roel Janssen