I think it would be good to have one indeed. The full tarballs.nixos.org must be really big though: what we need is only the tarballs for a given version of nixpkgs. For this, we want to get all the external files referenced by all the derivations we want to cache, then download them.
I haven’t worked on it lately as I was on vacation, and now I still need to do a lot of other things. I try to advance on this subject in parallel to the other parts of my preparation.
The blocking points for me right now are:
- For a given derivation, how do we know its external dependencies?
- What is the set of derivations that we want to include? For instance, many packages in
texlive.combined.scheme-fullare not in the binary cache, but this is typically something that would be interesting to have in the tarballs. Same forbeam.packages.erlangRxx.*: not everything is pre-compiled with every erlang version available here, but I’d like to have the sources so I can compile them offline.