Re: Proposition to streamline our NAR collection to just zstd-compressed ones

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Tue, 09 Jan 2024 at 21:32, Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> wrote:

> What do you think?  Should we go ahead and effect the following simple
> change for the Berlin build farm?
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> modified   hydra/modules/sysadmin/services.scm
> @@ -683,7 +683,7 @@ to a selected directory.")
>                     ;; 
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2021-01/msg00097.html>
>                     ;; for the compression ratio/decompression speed
>                     ;; tradeoffs.
> -                   (compression '(("lzip" 9) ("zstd" 19)))
> +                   (compression '(("zstd" 19)))
>                     (cache-bypass-threshold cache-bypass-threshold)
>                     (workers publish-workers)))
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I think it is a good idea but the change is more than just oneline. ;-)

I agree with Ludo: the change requires communication.  Something like:

 1. Blog post.  Something like that [1], a bit extended with a Migration
    section.

 2. A news (guix pull --news) announcing the sunset date.  And probably
    pointing to the blog post (or elsewhere) for helping the migration.

 3. Optionally emit a warning when the daemon is “too” old.


I agree that the extra space can be annoying.  In the same time, user
experience matters more, IMHO.

Cheers,
simon

1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2022/sunsetting-gzip-substitutes-availability/