Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I don't know how we'd best present a store on windows. I'm anything but an expert on this, so I can only hope to provide seeds for a productive discussion.

Possible solutions

• C:\nix\store: works on most systems?

  • Requires admin permissions to modify C:\
  • Somewhat dependent on physical location
    • NTFS symlinks can do something, but are not opaque to programs
      • => more impurity

• \\nix\store

  • How's support for network drives in the windows ecosystem? Not great?

    • When using CMD, cd \wsl$\Ubuntu\home will not work (as CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories), however copy \wsl$\Ubuntu\home\somefile.txt C:\dev\ will work
      -- Microsoft dev blog

      • Nix store as a forcing function to improve the windows ecosystem to adopt UNC more? Nix is supposed to be ambitious?
  • Probably requires admin permissions too
  • Looks nice
    • More virtual than a drive letter
  • Independent of physical location
    • Presumably the API we use to achieve this allows us to present the store in a very low entropy manner - very opaque, which is great for reproducibility
  • Implementation?
    • SMB? Possibly slow]
    • WebDAV seems to be an alternative. This may be easier to work with, but not a substantial user facing improvement over SMB?
    • API that backs SMB and/or WebDAV? Does that exist? Haven't found it yet.
    • WSL seems to use 9P file protocol!
      • Microsoft dev blog announcement with some details

Priorities

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