Re: [gwl-devel] Next steps for the GWL

[Pjotr Prins]

IPFS is meant for data sharing and reproducibility. It also allows for
private networks which is rather important.

Scalability of IPFS is a concern, so either we cache using IPFS or we
have some other caching mechanism.

git-annex is too much of a hack in my book. It also does not scale
that well.

Pj.

On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 12:55:52PM +0200, zimoun wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 12:11, Ricardo Wurmus
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > > One of the things I'd love to do
> > > with GWL is to make it play well with git-annex, something that would
> > > almost certainly be too specific for GWL itself.  For example
> > >
> > >   * Make data caching git-annex aware.  When deciding to recompute data
> > >     files, GWL avoids computing the hash of data files, using scripts as
> > >     the cheaper proxy, as you described in address@hidden
> > >     But if the user is tracking data files with git-annex, getting the
> > >     hash of data files becomes less expensive because we can ask
> > >     git-annex for the hash it has already computed.
> > >
> > >   * Support getting annex data files on demand (i.e. 'git annex get') if
> > >     they are needed as inputs.
> >
> > I wonder what the protocol should look like.  Should a workflow
> > explicitly request a “git annex” file or should it be up to the person
> > running the workflow, i.e. when “git annex” has been configured to be
> > the cache backend it would simply look up the declared input/output
> > files there.
> >
> > I suppose the answers would equally apply to using IPFS as a cache.
> 
> I agree that the mechanism such as `git-annex` should be nice.
> But is it not a mean for the CAS that we previously discussed?
> 
> I fully agree with the features and their description. Totally cool!
> However, I am a bit reluctant with `git-annex` because it requires a
> Haskell compiler and it is far far from "bootstrapability". I am aware
> of the Ricardo's try---and AFIAK the only one. And here [1]
> explanations by one Haskeller.
> 
> My opinion: GWL should stay on the path of Reproducibility,
> end-to-end. So `git-annex` should be a transitional step---while the
> Haskell bootstrap is not solved---as a mean for the CAS (cache) and I
> would find more elegant to use the "data-oriented IPFS": IPLD [2].
> 
> 
> [1] https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/748-Thoughts_on_bootstrapping_GHC
> [2] https://ipld.io/
> 
> 
> All the best,
> simon
>