Designing importers (was: (Re-) Designing extracting-downloader)

[Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com>]

Am 26.03.22 um 01:56 schrieb Maxim Cournoyer:

[Answering on the question how to design the extracting download I 
originally thought of using got hex.pm packages:]

> Is there a strong reason to want to use the archive instead of the
> sources from the project repository?

For the same reason you prefer to import from a PyPI package instead of 
the project git-repo: The metadata is easily available.

Anyhow, using the git-repo could be a pro, since the hex.pm package 
might miss tests or test-data. OTOH I discovered that some Erlang 
projects have the build-tool binary („rebar3“)  committed in the 
git-repo, So when using the git-repo, this needs to be removed by a 
snippet (which would not be required when using the hex.pm archive).

So this is a more general discussion: Would it be better — also in 
regard to detecting new versions — to use the projects source-repo or 
the package manager's repo.

Given the recent discussion about how to make packaging easier, maybe 
the hex.pm importer (and others) should become much more capable: E.g. 
the importer could fetch the meta-data from hex.pm and then create a 
package definition pointing to github (falling back to hex.pm). And then 
- to make life easy for packagers, check the repo for „rebar3“ and in 
case create a snippet for removing it.

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |