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A Nix store that works well on Windows #9389

@roberth

Description

@roberth

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!

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