Cayetano Santos <[email protected]> writes:

> SourceHut side, these are not OCI container images. They run a daily
> cron job. Starting from the previous image, they build a new one,
> replacing it.
>
> I like this way of doing things, as this produces an always up to date
> image (with its drawbacks).  As you can see, this process might break
> from time to time, but is not frequent
>
>     https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/refresh/guix
>
> The scripts are rather simple:
>
>     https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/item/images/guix

Let me see if I understand:

1) These are full-blown 'guix system' images?  How large are they?  As
far as I recall, 'guix system' images are not suitable for container
environments, or are there exceptions?  Are your images more like 'cloud
images' than 'container images' perhaps?  I see you use qcow2.  Would
they work in a 'libvirt' environment?  I really want that too, but it is
different from container images.

2) The set of packages is interesting to compare: curl git-minimal gnupg
mercurial openssh-sans-x %base-packages

3) This is effectively doing a iterative 'guix pull && guix system
reconfigure' to update itself?  How was the first image bootstrapped?

My images are built from Debian containers, and I would like to avoid
that and just built them from the previous pure Guix container itself.
But I don't want to lose the bootstrapping ability, which feels
important.  Maybe building once from pure Guix and once bootstrapped
from Debian+Guix and test for reproducibility would help.  Perhaps this
aspect is not worth keeping in any official Guix images, I doubt you
want to run anything Debian as part of that?

> It would be nice to have, indeed, a common (as much as possible), common
> base for all images / containers.

Yep!

>> A basic sanity check would probably if they are built from purely Guix
>> sources, right?  My impression was that the MetaCall Guix images are
>> more similar to my Debian+Guix images, or has that changed?  That is,
>> combines some other OS like Alpine or Debian with Guix installed on it.
>> Sorry if I'm completely misrepresenting things here, please help me
>> understand this space.
>
> TBH, I haven’t had the time to look in detail how gitlab / github
> alternatives operate, as I’m mostly sr.ht based. But I’m all in to make
> part of a team of interested people on that matter !

Me too.  I'm not strongly merried to GitLab, it is just the system I'm
using since it gives me what I want.  But containers should work with
GitHub Actions and Codeberg too.  Hopefully the same, but we could
publish a couple of variants if there are mutually exclusive
requirements.

/Simon

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