Re: time-machine broken from 2019-04-07 to 2019-05-04

[zimoun]

Hi Konrad,

On Mon, 17 Feb 2020 at 10:48, Konrad Hinsen <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> zimoun <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > What should be the fix?
> > Because it is annoying to be dependent of upstream bad practise.
> >
> > Well, is it fixable?
>
> The root cause of the problem is the mutability of URLs. The solution is
> to move on to immutable references. Such as git commits.

I agree. It is more or less an implicit rule in Guix: 'git-fetch' is
preferable than 'url-fetch' when possible.
Moreover, by using "git" origin, it is easier to archive in SWH; "guix
lint" does that. :-)


> My impression is that tarballs are the preferred source code reference
> used in Guix today, with git commits used only when there is no release
> tarball. Is that an official policy, or just historical accident?
> If a policy, what's the reason for it?

The current fix is to have the correct copy on ci.guix.gnu.org.

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=39575#32


Well, Guix will export soon all the sources ('origin') of its packages
in JSON file (the patch still needs minor tweaks), then SWH could
ingest and archive. It is a join task with Nix: the SWH crawler is
written by lewo and it already seems working for the type 'url'; soon
the type 'git' (or 'svn', 'hg', etc.).

Therefore, the future should be fixed. ;-)
The past is not yet... because there is no guarantee that all the
upstreams are still reachable... and/or archived. Probably a TODO item
for the Guix Data Service. ;-)

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-02/msg00233.html


Cheers,
simon