Reading about OCaml carbon footprint policies, I said wow that’s the right direction. 😀

Hey #Guix, what about hooking Cuirass, the Build Coordinator and Nar helder?

I know, enough in the plate already… Well, maybe a good student’s project. It could be very helpful to extract from the CI various metrics and evaluate at best the Guix carbon footprint; eventually.

https://ocaml.org/policies/carbon-footprint

@zimoun This looks to me like a pledge more than a policy.

I find it interesting but also hand-wavy, bordering on capitalist greenwashing in some places (when it talks about “offsetting one’s carbon footprint”).

I think the CI optimizations are of course useful and should be done. Yet I think it’s micro-optimization; the bigger picture should be “why are we building this piece of software in the first place, at the cost of N person-years?”.

This is of course harder to answer.

@zimoun To clarify my point, they mention “CI that rebuilds hundreds of packages against multiple compilers”. Surely this consumes a lot of energy.

But what’s the cost of not doing it? Perhaps it’s tens of engineers independently dealing with regressions later, which could be way more expensive.

Then again, if CI reduces the amount of work necessary downstream, there’s going to be rebound effects.

The only way out is for all to work less.

@civodul There is one thing that I’m missing with the reasoning.

One of the motivations for the migration to Codeberg is to have more contributors, more reviews, merge faster, etc. i.e., work more and not work less.

Somehow, we all want success for any project and it seems hard to find the right balance: the adequate balance probably depends on the project itself.

That’s why I find interessting to clarify the intents using a pledge and monitor the project consumption.

Do I agree with the OCaml way? Probably not. Does it inspire me? Yes. 😀

@zimoun I think we agree. The difficulty is to meaningfully turn a pledge into a policy and to implement it; it’s not as simple as “turn off half of CI” or “drop 1,000 packages”, but it’s worth thinking about ways to guide our decisions with that in mind.

@civodul @zimoun In the case of Guix, turning off half of CI would certainly not reduce power consumption since more people would build from source without substitutes.