Hi Ludo,

On Mon, 21 Nov 2022 at 11:00, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> So that’d be 72% accurate package metadata for (M)ELPA, not too bad!

IMHO, one could extrapolate that if someone applies a similar approach
as Lars for CRAN, then 70-75% of (M)ELPA should build out-of-the box.

BTW, unrelated to the topic but note that I engaged a discussion [1]
with Org folk about using Guix as a brick for quality assurance of Emacs
packages – starting with Org. ;-)  Well, the GNU project should reuse
its own components instead of relying on other distros. :-)

1: <https://list.orgmode.org/orgmode/87sfiiycat.fsf@gmail.com/>


> I tried to estimate repository package data accuracy for my PackagingCon
> talk last year in a sophisticated way (perhaps too sophisticated):
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/plain/talks/packaging-con-2021/grail/talk.20211110.pdf
>   (slide 53)
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2021-10/msg00297.html

IIRC, you mainly investigated the accuracy of the importers…

> I think we should identify common sources of inaccuracy in package
> metadata

…and indeed maybe a systematic analysis of the modifications of the
default emacs-build-system could help in 2 directions:

 1. maybe draw some heuristics to improve the importer accuracy,

>              talk with repo maintainers to improve on that.

and 2. report upstream if some patterns appear.


Well, for packages using ’emacs-build-system’, only comparing ’keyword’
arguments, it reads:

        emacs        : 1234 = 1234 = 878  + 356
            ("phases" . 213)
            ("tests?" . 144)
            ("test-command" . 127)
            ("include" . 87)
            ("emacs" . 25)
            ("exclude" . 20)
            ("modules" . 7)
            ("imported-modules" . 4)
            ("parallel-tests?" . 1) 

Considering this 356 packages, 144 modifies the keyword #:tests?.  Note
that ’#:tests? #t’ is counted in these 144 and it reads,

    $ ag 'tests\? #t' gnu/packages/emacs-xyz.scm | wc -l
    117

Ah!  It requires some investigations. :-)

Indeed, it could be worth to identify common sources of the extra
modifications we are doing compared to the default emacs-build-system.


Cheers,
simon