On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 1:33 AM, Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wur...@mdc-berlin.de> wrote: > > Thompson, David <dthomps...@worcester.edu> writes: > >> On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Tomáš Čech <sleep_wal...@gnu.org> wrote: >> >>> First, I'm not saying that we should do that for every archive, but I >>> think that having a way how to automatically export this information >>> would be great and I see it as a week point for using Guix packages as >>> alternative to Snappy or Flatpak. >> >> I don't really understand the point of this back-and-forth. It's >> quite simple: If the user builds the same package expression with the >> same version of Guix, they will get the same result if the build is >> deterministic. I don't understand the contrast with Snappy and >> Flatpak because they don't provide this feature at all, opting instead >> to provide opaque binaries with no real provenance. I can only assume >> that there is some fundamental misunderstanding about Guix going on >> here. > > The point is that exporting a store item (or a package closure) is the > moral equivalent to producing an opaque binary. The claim is that Guix > could do better here. I agree to the first part but I’m not sure about > the second part. It would be very nice if Guix really *could* do better > here without having to embed a copy of itself to each exported package.
Derivations are purposely a one-way street. There's *no* way to get from the derivation back to the source. You always want to go from the source to the derivation. I think we're asking the wrong question here. It's not "I have a binary, now where is the source?", it's "I have the source, now is there a binary available?" - Dave
