Design a plugin frontend system to serve language level registry requests about attic

[blaggacao]

Re NAR

I'd also like to link flokli/nix-casync#41 which questions NAR in suggesting to unpack it internally.

---

_{Sidenote (maybe for @Ericson2314 — who likely knows all this already): based on Lennart's introductory post about casync the catar format (with its focus on reproducability) combined with --without= flags stripping undesired file metadata could uncompromisingly reproduce the goals of NAR while at the same time bringing the benefits of casync (-based distribution) to the Nix ecosystem.}

_{It reads: > As an extra twist, we introduce a well-defined, reproducible, random-access serialization format for file trees (think: a more modern tar), to permit efficient, stable storage of complete file trees in the system,}

[yangm97]

I can see somebody else gets triggered by npm fetcher storing tarballs, extracting stuff into a fake cache and tem copying everything (again!) into one giant closure which takes ages to (re)build.

However, this is a nixpkgs issue IMHO.