Re: store reference detection (was Re: JARs and reference scanning)

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

On April 26, 2017 4:53:33 AM PDT, Thomas Danckaert <post@thomasdanckaert.be> wrote:
[...]
>The code scanning for reference is in nix/libstore/references.cc .  
>It looks for base32 hashes encoded as character strings in the 
>binaries.
>
>Could/should this be generalized somehow?  Apart from compression, 
>store filenames encoded with 16-bit character encodings also cause 
>problems (can happen with Qt or WxWidgets).  And the are probably 
>more cases where it fails.
>
>Does it make sense to expand the reference detecting code (perhaps 
>this would lead to too many different special cases?), or maybe 
>provide a mechanism to force references when the daemon cannot detect 
>them.  I suppose you can always add a text file with a list of store 
>items to the output, but maybe there's a more elegant way?
>
>Thomas

The text file idea with the dependencies that Hartmut proposed seems an elegant solution; it would make the reference searching process cheaper and available for any kind of format.