Questions about packaging

[Tanguy Le Carrour <tanguy@bioneland.org>]

Hi Guix

I'm currently working on packaging python-poetry and, unsurprisingly,
I have questions! :-)
I guess some of them have already been answered somewhere, so don't
hesitate to point me to a previous thread or post…

1) Updating a package
What am I suppose to do when updating a package to a different minor or
major version? This could break depending packages if they have strict
depedencies.

For instance, when I run:
    ./pre-inst-env guix build python-poetry
I get:
    error: Could not find suitable distribution for
    Requirement.parse('cachecontrol[filecache]<0.13.0,>=0.12.4')

So I would have to update python-cachecontrol from 0.11.6 to 0.12.5.
Should I create a python-cachecontrol-0.11.6 and fix all the packages
that depend on it? Only the one that would break?

Btw, python-cachecontrol seems to be broken. I'll work on that. But
before I'll have to find an answer to question 3.

2) Getting archive from pypi
This one has been bothering me for a long time, and was confirmed few
days ago by a comment I read in the package definition of python-cachecontrol:
"Pypi does not have tests".
Has I understand it, to make sure that a package works with the
dependencies provided by the distrubution (Guix), tests must pass!
Most of the time, tests are not in the python package downloaded from pypi.
Actually, I think that they should not be. They should be in a `tests/` folder
in the sources. But that's a different topic.
So I guess that one should always make sure that the tests can be
executed from the Pypi download, or use Git to get the sources.
Any thoughts?

3) Deactivating tests on purpose
In my case, python-poetry depends on python-cachecontrol which tests
depend (for some weird reasons) on Cherrypy. Cherrypy is a (large) web framework
and has a lot of dependencies!
In that case, is it OK to disable python-cachecontrol's tests?
Or would it be better to ask one of the project to drop one of the
dependency?! (Poetry dropping CacheControl, or CacheControl dropping
CherryPy)

4) Submitting an incomplete patch series
Having run into those problems, I'm a bit stuck with a pile of patches.
Some of them could be submitted. Should I submit them separatly?

I'm really looking forward to reading your answers!

-- 
Tanguy