Re: Accuracy of importers?

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 28 octobre 2021 03:02:27 GMT-04:00, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> a écrit :
>Hello Guix!
>
>As I’m preparing my PackagingCon talk and wondering how language package
>managers could make our lives easier, I thought it’d be interesting to
>know how well our importers are doing.
>
>My understanding is that most of them require manual intervention—i.e.,
>one has to tweak what ‘guix import’ produces, even if we ignore
>synopsis/description/license, to set the right inputs, etc.  If we were
>to estimate the fraction of imported packages for which manual changes
>are needed, what would it look like?
>
>   importer     fraction of imported packages needing changes
>
>   gnu          90% (doesn’t know about dependencies)
>   pypi         50% (some miss source distro, “sdist”; some have
>                     non-Python deps)
>   cpan         ?
>   hackage      ?
>   stackage     (Lars?)
>   egg          (Xinglu?)
>   elpa         (Nicolas?)
>   gem          ?
>   go           (Sarah? Leo? Raghav?)
>   cran         5% (Ricardo? Simon? seems to almost always work?)
>   crate        10% (Efraim?)
>   texlive      (Ricardo? Thiago? Marius?)
>   opam         (Julien?)

I find it pretty good, when importing huge numbers of packages recently, I was able to build all of them without modification. However, lots rely on a github tarball, so I would change the source in these cases before sending them to guix.

>   minetest     (Maxime? Vivien?)
>   julia (WIP)  (Simon?)
>   npm (WIP)    (Jelle? Timothy?)
>
>(Lower is better.)  What would be your estimate?  
>
>Among those, which importers provide source that differs from what you’d
>get from upstream’s checkout or release tarballs?  My guess:
>
>   pypi (see LastPyMile paper)
>   elpa (gives hosted tarballs that can differ from upstream repo)
>   gem (similar to PyPI)
>   npm (ditto)
>
>What about licensing info: which ones provide accurate licensing info?
>My guess:
>
>   gnu
>   pypi
>   cpan
>   cran
>   elpa
>   go (?)
>   cran
>   crate (?)
>   texlive
>   opam (?)
>   minetest (?)
>
>TIA! :-)
>
>Ludo’.
>