(original message was formatted in rich text, so I decided to resend it in plain text) Hi guix! Recently I used nixos on one of my machines. And I noticed people there use tar balls for fetching package definitions. And It worked much faster for me. That was surprising and I decided to write this letter. Is git the right tool for getting new package definitions? What if git commits history will become enormous? As I see, the first guix pull is running too long for a lot of people. Probably, there are ways to cache all of this. Anyway, I'm just curious about it. If there are already answers for my question, I would like to read them.