bug#31319: ghc-case-insensitive: Duplicate 'inputs' field.

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Ludovic,

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>
>> Our 'ghc-case-insensitive' package contains two 'inputs' field
>> initializers.  If I'm not mistaken, the first one is being effectively
>> ignored, so 'ghc-hunit' is not actually an input.
>>
>> It would be good to clean this up so that we can start raising errors
>> when duplicate field initializers are present.
>
> What about applying your patch that detects duplicate fields, rebuilding
> all the .go files, and then resolving any such case by keeping only the
> last occurrence of the field?
>
> This is what happens currently anyway so it won’t change the derivations
> produced for the faulty packages.

It's true that it wouldn't change anything to simply remove those
ignored duplicate field initializers.  However, I thought it would be
better to give people familiar with these packages an opportunity to
investigate.  Someone may have had a good reason for adding those
inputs, even if they are not strictly needed for a successful build.

Of course, at some point we should timeout on this.  I would advocate
commenting out the redundant duplicates instead of simply deleting them,
along with a FIXME comment asking someone to investigate.  We could also
look in the commit history to find out who added those redundant inputs,
and ask them directly.

If you're impatient to get the duplicate field detection patch committed
soon, I could implement these "timeout" measures in the next couple of
days.

What do you think?

      Mark