From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludovic.courtes@inria.fr (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: hpcguix-web, channels, and inferiors Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2018 18:17:22 +0200 Message-ID: <87bm885pwt.fsf@inria.fr> References: <87pnxqkbmg.fsf@gnu.org> <87zhvv5c4n.fsf@lassieur.org> <875zyi191w.fsf@inria.fr> <87sh1l62ge.fsf@lassieur.org> <87zhvs69gd.fsf@inria.fr> <87ftxksk0v.fsf@elephly.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:39952) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1g8Snc-0001se-Hs for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 05 Oct 2018 12:17:57 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1g8SnZ-0003hK-BC for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 05 Oct 2018 12:17:56 -0400 Received: from mail2-relais-roc.national.inria.fr ([192.134.164.83]:32565) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1g8SnY-0003fv-Ve for guix-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 05 Oct 2018 12:17:53 -0400 In-Reply-To: <87ftxksk0v.fsf@elephly.net> (Ricardo Wurmus's message of "Fri, 05 Oct 2018 13:36:00 +0200") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Ricardo Wurmus Cc: guix-devel , =?utf-8?Q?Cl=C3=A9ment?= Lassieur Ricardo Wurmus skribis: > Ludovic Court=C3=A8s writes: > >>> Yes I agree. I wonder though: is there a way to know if a specific >>> derivation is a package? >> >> In general no. Of course one could play trick to try and guess whether >> it corresponds to a package, but that should be avoided IMO. > > I wonder if we should work towards specifying a type for derivations. > This could be useful for the user interface to be able to clearly > distinguish grafts from full package builds. > > Currently, there=E2=80=99s no way to tell if the derivations listed under= =E2=80=9CThese > derivations will be built=E2=80=9D are expensive package builds or just s= imple > graft derivations. Indeed. A simple trick would be to (ab)use the environment variable part of derivations as a property list, the way Nix has traditionally done it (see =E2=80=98user+system-env-vars=E2=80=99 in (guix derivations)). So we could have, say, a =E2=80=98hint=E2=80=99 environment variable, and t= he UI would use that to determine if it=E2=80=99s a graft. Thoughts? Ludo=E2=80=99.