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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/guix.texi')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/guix.texi | 12 |
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/doc/guix.texi b/doc/guix.texi index bad2d36e42..db2013c16b 100644 --- a/doc/guix.texi +++ b/doc/guix.texi @@ -4990,7 +4990,13 @@ what you should use in this case (@pxref{Invoking guix copy}). @cindex nar, archive format @cindex normalized archive (nar) -Archives are stored in the ``normalized archive'' or ``nar'' format, which is +@cindex nar bundle, archive format +Each store item is written in the @dfn{normalized archive} or @dfn{nar} +format (described below), and the output of @command{guix archive +--export} (and input of @command{guix archive --import}) is a @dfn{nar +bundle}. + +The nar format is comparable in spirit to `tar', but with differences that make it more appropriate for our purposes. First, rather than recording all Unix metadata for each file, the nar format only mentions @@ -5000,6 +5006,10 @@ entries are stored always follows the order of file names according to the C locale collation order. This makes archive production fully deterministic. +That nar bundle format is essentially the concatenation of zero or more +nars along with metadata for each store item it contains: its file name, +references, corresponding derivation, and a digital signature. + When exporting, the daemon digitally signs the contents of the archive, and that digital signature is appended. When importing, the daemon verifies the signature and rejects the import in case of an invalid |