Re: [PATCH] gnu: password-store: Wrap PATH.

[Alex Griffin <a@ajgrf.com>]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016, at 09:02 AM, Thompson, David wrote:
> Sorry I'm late, but I don't think this is the right fix.  Wrapping
> programs should only be considered after other options are exhausted.
> The correct fix is to patch the source directly to refer to
> executables by their absolute path.  Why wasn't it done this way?

Mostly because it would be a lot of on-going work every time the package
is updated. As a shell script, it invokes an external tool nearly every
other line. If you look at the discussion that happened in February when
the package was first added [1], Jessica (the original packager) was
really discouraged by the prospect of patching every invocation of an
external tool. She also tried to submit changes upstream so that kind of
work wouldn't be necessary, but upstream wasn't very receptive to the
idea. In the end, the package was just committed to Guix in a broken
state.

Another approach I considered was adding a bunch of shell aliases to the
top of the script pointing to the Guix store. That makes the problem a
lot more tractable than replacing every external invocation, but it's
still kinda complicated and it still requires finding every single
program that gets called and keeping it up to date with new releases. So
even if all upstream does is use another program from coreutils, the fix
would be out-of-date again.

[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-02/msg01310.html
-- 
Alex Griffin