Hi ! In the next few weeks, I'm about to set up my own server hardware running Guix, and I thought about providing a substitute server for the community. However I have no idea about the required disk space.
I won't have a lot of spare space yet, so what I had in mind was to have a "stable" commit for which all packages build without breakage, and have all those available for substitution, and then try to advance to the latest commit on master that does not break anything. Once such a commit is found, I'd advance the "stable" commit to point to this one, redeploy/reconfigure all the services to this commit, and gc the previous one. Does that make sense ? This would also prevent updates that break stuff. Granted, the built-in rollback functionality is awesome, but having a package break from under me is still not fun. For example a few weeks ago I could'nt build ungoogled-chromium, but I needed to join a team meeting fast, etc. This is not a piece of software I use every day so I had no idea which revision to rollback to, or which commit to time-machine to, and I did not have the time to find out. I ended up borrowing my wife's Mac. Also, by bisecting the commits, one could find the source of the breakage. So I would need the space in the store for around two or three "universes": the stable one, and trying to find the next stable one. Even with a bad approximation, do you have any idea how much a single version of all guix packages ends up taking in the store ? I know about initiatives like guix weather, etc. but I did not look into it too much. Any advice about setting up the substitute server in a way that is useful to the community is welcome. Any advice in general as well. Cheers, Edouard.
