Am Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 11:43:44AM +0200 schrieb Cayetano Santos: > I see, but I still don’t see the benefit of tarballs over git repos > (except when the tarball includes something else), as this adds an extra > layer of complexity.
Well, I would say it also depends on the upstream project. I am maintainer (and releaser) of a GNU project that by tradition relies on tarballs as releases. These are created by "make distcheck" and tested as such on other architectures. Then they are signed and uploaded. Probably you would get the same result by using the corresponding git tag, but this is not what I would consider our release. So in this case it is maybe more natural to use the tarball as the source in Guix, although I would not mind either if we decided to switch to a git checkout. Then unless I misunderstand how git checkouts work, tarballs should require less memory for a project with a long history, as they just capture the state of the files at one precise moment. And a git repository may also contain large files (such as documentation) that is not part of the released tarball. Andreas
