docs(tvix): add a list of TODOs/ideas r/8005

This contains a rough collection of ideas on the TODO list, trying to
keep track of it somewhere.

Change-Id: Ifc5b0cf9f7ac38f7a8e56515882bdf70e349544b
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/11512
Autosubmit: flokli <flokli@flokli.de>
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: picnoir picnoir <picnoir@alternativebit.fr>

1 files changed, 129 insertions, 0 deletions

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+# TODO
+
+This contains a rough collection of ideas on the TODO list, trying to keep track
+of it somewhere.
+
+Of course, there's no guarantee these things will get addressed, but it helps
+dumping the backlog somewhere.
+
+Feel free to add new ideas. Before picking something, ask in `#tvix-dev` to make
+sure noone is working on this, or has some specific design in mind already.
+
+## Cleanups
+ - move some of the rstest cases in `tvix-glue` to the `.nix`/`.exp` mechanism.
+   - Parts requiring test fixtures need some special convention.
+     Some of these also cannot be checked into the repo, like the import tests
+     adding special files to test filtering.
+ - add `nix_oracle` mechanism from `tvix-eval` to `tvix-glue`.
+
+## Fixes towards correctness
+ - `builtins.toXML` is missing string context. See b/398.
+ - `builtins.toXML` self-closing tags need to be configurable in a more granular
+   fashion, requires third-party crate support. See b/399.
+ - `rnix` only supports string source files, but `NixString` uses bytes (and Nix
+   source code might be no valid UTF-8).
+
+## Documentation
+Extend the other pages in here. Some ideas on what should be tackled:
+ - Document what Tvix is, and what it is not yet. What it is now, what it is not
+   (yet), explaining some of the architectural choices (castore, more hermetic
+   `Build` repr), while still being compatible. Explain how it's possible to
+   plug in other frontends, and use `tvix-{[ca]store,build}` without Nixlang even.
+   And how `nix-compat` is a useful crate for all sorts of formats and data
+   types of Nix.
+ - Update the Architecture diagram to model the current state of things.
+   There's no gRPC between Coordinator and Evaluator.
+ - Add a dedicated section/page explaining the separation between tvix-glue and
+   tvix-eval, and how more annoying builtins get injected into tvix-eval through
+   tvix-glue.
+   Maybe restructure to only explain the component structure potentially
+   crossing process boundaries (those with gRPC), and make the rest more crate
+   and trait-focused?
+ - Restructure docs on castore vs store, this seems to be duplicated a bit and
+   is probably still not too clear.
+ - Describe store composition(s) in more detail. There's some notes on granular
+   fetching which probably can be repurposed.
+ - Absorb the rest of //tvix/website into this.
+
+## Features
+
+### CLI
+ - `nix repl` can set variables and effectively mutates a global scope. We
+  should update the existing / add another repl that allows the same. We don't
+  want to mutate the evaluator, but should construct a new one, passing in the
+  root scope returned from the previous evaluation.
+
+### Fetchers
+Some more fetcher-related builtins need work:
+ - `fetchGit`
+ - `fetchTree` (hairy, seems there's no proper spec and the URL syntax seems
+   subject to change/underdocumented)
+
+### Convert builtins:fetchurl to Fetches
+We need to convert `builtins:fetchurl`-style calls to `builtins.derivation` to
+fetches, not Derivations (tracked in `KnownPaths`).
+
+### Derivation -> Build
+While we have some support for `structuredAttrs` and `fetchClosure` (at least
+enough to calculate output hashes, aka produce identical ATerm), the code
+populating the `Build` struct doesn't exist it yet.
+
+Similarly, we also don't properly populate the build environment for
+`fetchClosure` yet. (Note there already is `ExportedPathInfo`, so once
+`structuredAttrs` is there this should be easy.
+
+### Builders
+Once builds are proven to work with real-world builds, and the corner cases
+there are ruled out, adding other types of builders might be interesting.
+
+ - bwrap
+ - gVisor
+ - Cloud Hypervisor (using similar technique as `//tvix//boot`).
+
+Long-term, we want to extend traits and gRPC protocol to expose more telemetry,
+logs etc, but this is something requiring a lot of designing.
+
+### Store composition
+ - Combinators: list-by-priority, first-come-first-serve, cache
+ - How do describe hierarchies. URL format too one-dimensional, but we might get
+   quite far with a similar "substituters" concept that Nix uses, to construct
+   the composed stores.
+### Store Config
+   There's already serde for some store options (bigtable uses `serde_qs`).
+   We might also have common options global over all backends, like chunking
+   parameters for chunking blobservices. Think where this would fit in.
+ - Rework the URL syntax for object_store. We should support the default s3/gcs
+   URLs at least.
+
+### BlobService
+ - On the trait side, currently there's no way to distinguish reading a
+   known-chunk vs blob, so we might be calling `.chunks()` unnecessarily often.
+   At least for the `object_store` backend, this might be a problem.
+ - While `object_store` recently got support for `Content-Type`
+   (https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/pull/5650), there's no support on the
+   local filesystem yet. We'd need to add support to this (through xattrs).
+
+### DirectoryService
+ - Add an `object_store` variant, storing a Directory *closure* keyed by the
+   root `Directory` digest. This won't allow indexing intermediate Directory
+   nodes, but once we have `DirectoryService` composition, it shouldn't be an
+   issue.
+ - [redb](https://www.redb.org/) backend
+
+### PathInfoService
+ - [redb](https://www.redb.org/) backend
+ - sqlite backend (different schema than the Nix one, we need the root nodes data!)
+
+### Nix-compat
+- Async NAR reader (@edef?)
+
+### Nix Daemon protocol
+- Some work ongoing on the worker operation parsing. Partially blocked on the async NAR reader.
+
+### O11Y
+ - gRPC trace propagation (cl/10532)
+ - `tracing-tracy` (cl/10952)
+ - `[tracing-]indicatif` for progress/log reporting (floklis stash)
+ - unification into `tvix-tracing` crate, currently a lot of boilerplate
+   in `tvix-store` CLI entrypoint, and half of the boilerplate copied over to
+   `tvix-cli`.