Add an Overview section to the README

To try and provide some information about the motivation for the Guix Data
Service.
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Christopher Baines 2020-02-01 10:40:11 +01:00
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README
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It's written in Guile, stores data in a PostgreSQL database, and provides a
web interface and API to browse and access the data.
* Overview
The aim of the Guix Data Service is to provide a complementary interface to
Guix itself, providing a different way of interacting with Guix data, which
hopefully enables tools and services that otherwise wouldn't be feasible to
write.
For example, with the command line tooling or Guile API for Guix, you can
quickly and easily access information about packages, and manipulate
derivations. However, if you wish to compare two revisions of Guix, or look at
the history of the derivations for a package over recent Guix revisions, it
could take some time until you have the information you're looking for.
However, with the Guix Data Service, this information can be gathered
continuously, and stored in a a manor that makes these kind of queries much
quicker to answer. By storing data abount multiple Guix revisions in a SQL
database (PostgreSQL), it becomes possible to quickly compare the data for
different revisions. By configuring the Guix Data Service to listen for
changes in the Guix Git repository, the database can be kept up to date.
* Local Development
There's no one right way of doing local development, but outlined here is a