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   Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸 (alxlg@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 26-Feb-2024 00:13:56 JST Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸

   • Adam H. Sparks :rstats:

   @zimoun @adamhsparks

   In my opinion, #Guix is an overkill for anything except computer science research. I think an approach that has better chances to succeed is reusing the OCI ecosystem and in particular using #ComposeFS for a per-file deduplication, that is important for large datasets. The missing piece for me it's a package manager for knowledge i.e. that links papers, datasets, source code for both calculations and documents (LaTeX, #Typst etc) in a graph of dependencies, citations etc.

   • Embed this notice
     Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸 (alxlg@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 26-Feb-2024 00:13:54 JST Alex L 🕊 🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Adam H. Sparks :rstats:

     @civodul @adamhsparks @zimoun

     > To explore the behavior of the code, we need more. Guix eases exploration with “package transformation options”, which let users deploy variants of the software environment, for example by applying a patch somewhere in the software stack or swapping one dependency for another. A “frozen” application bundle such as a Docker image does not provide this lever.

     Why? And what do you mean by "opaque" container image?

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Monday, 26-Feb-2024 00:13:54 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Adam H. Sparks :rstats:

     @alxlg A container image is a bunch of bytes, itself the result of a complex computational process: running ‘apt install’, building software, etc.

     If all you have are those bytes, you cannot tell where they come from—just like when given a cake, you can at best guess what ingredients it contains, but you cannot tell whether it contains Novichok nor derive its recipe.

     @zimoun @adamhsparks

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Monday, 26-Feb-2024 00:13:56 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Adam H. Sparks :rstats:

     @alxlg I challenge the assertion that “Guix is overkill” for your research. What would that even mean? That it makes your computational workflow “too” reproducible⁈

     Not the first time I read that. I tried to answer this question, namely “Is reproducibility practical?” 👇
     https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/07/is-reproducibility-practical/

     Also, there may be other ways to implement that, but opaque container images are not one of them.

     @adamhsparks @zimoun

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     Raito Bezarius (raito@nixos.paris)'s status on Monday, 26-Feb-2024 00:15:01 JST Raito Bezarius

     in reply to

     • Adam H. Sparks :rstats:

     @alxlg @zimoun @adamhsparks NixOS developer here, I think that OCI ecosystem has unfortunately no chance to give the practical reproducibility constraints that Guix (or Nix but whatever) can offer you.

     I'd look at it from a social PoV, there's no incentive, no interest for the OCI ecosystem to offer this sort of feature because industry does not care about this sort of thing.

     *wears tvix.dev developer hat* ComposerFS is inferior to better store solutions for large dataset too.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.