CUDA-Team: discuss binary distribution via Hydra or otherwise

[ConnorBaker]

Issue to track discussion and thoughts on binary distribution.

One potential way forward is continuing the petition to allow Hydra to build and cache unfree redistributables, which would allow redistributing CUDA-accelerated binaries.

There are also other ways forward -- custom binary caches, maintaining our own branch of Nixpkgs, and many others.

Let's hear your thoughts!

[ConnorBaker]

@SomeoneSerge you had good thoughts on maintaining our own cache and having a cuda-stable branch. Would you mind sharing those here?

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/cuda-team-roadmap-and-call-for-sponsors/29495/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/cuda-team-roadmap-update-2023-08-29/32379/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/community-calendar/18589/103

[SomeoneSerge]

Since this has been linked from discourse, here are some additional references to the past discussions:

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/76233
• https://github.com/NVIDIA/build-system-archive-import-examples/issues/10

[SomeoneSerge]

One more thing to note is that technically there's no reason not to cache the redist FODs, other than that it'd be weird to expose them in separate attributes just for hydra. They're explicitly redistributable and we don't patch their contents. Related: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/106471