Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add perl-db_file.

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

Hi Andreas,

On Tue, 26 Jul 2016 20:35:31 +0200
Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> wrote:

> > * gnu/packages/databases.scm (perl-db_file): New variable.  
> > The name should be "perl-db-file": we replace all special characters with "-".

The package name (not the variable name) was chosen by "guix import cpan". So it should probably be fixed in the CPAN importer, too.
 
> Here I would not rewrite the complete file, but instead use substitute* to
> replace "/usr/local/BerkeleyDB" with the assoc-ref. You will find many
> examples of this in the repository. 

Yeah, I thought about it but decided against it - there are very few options in that file, substitute* can't substitute entire lines (or only at the beginning of the line) or entire words (so it's not safe), the user is supposed to set PREFIX and HASH (it's just a coincidence we didn't have to change them) and if we did that then new versions of the package could sneak in new options we wouldn't notice but we should have changed. Better for it to fail instead of silently doing something strange.

But I will use substitute* in the next version of the patch - the unit tests should be able to fail for some of the errors.

> +  (description "DB_File provides access to Berkeley DB version 1.x.")
> 
> Maybe add "perl" somewhere in the description? "provides Perl bindings to..."
> or something like that?

OK!