Re: [PATCH] Clean all .go in clean-go

[Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@gnu.org>]

Hello,

Eric Bavier <ericbavier@openmailbox.org> writes:

> From: Eric Bavier <bavier@member.fsf.org>
>
> I encountered a runtime error recently while running `guix system
> reconfigure`.  Thinking this might be because of an ABI break I ran `make clean-go && make` before trying again, with the same result.
>
> It turns out a module had been renamed, in this case fish.scm to shells.scm,
> but I had overlooked this and failed to update the list of modules in my
> config.scm's (use-package-modules ...) statement.  However, I still had a
> stale fish.go sitting in my build directory, which `make clean-go` had failed
> to clean up, and guix happily loaded it.
>
> I believe the following patch is an appropriate way to avoid such errors in
> the future.

AIUI the main problem is that the API for defining "config.scm" is not
stable because of the package modules renames.  Since package names are
more stable, I think that configuration files should import (gnu
packages) and use 'specification->package' when possible to resolve
packages, instead of relying on the module names.  Maybe we should fix
the "config.scm" documentation?

In regards of the .go files remaining in the build directory, I agree
that this is not good, however I don't think it is worth trying to fix
this issue which equally applies to every file generated by Make.  Using
wildcards can be tempting in such cases but it can lead to accidental
file deletions which is worse IMO.  As a consequence I would prefer
keeping the current 'clean-go' rule.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin