Re: Patches to add emacs-rfcview and emacs-ffap-rfc-space

[Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com>]

Federico Beffa (2016-04-14 19:59 +0300) wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Alex Kost (2016-04-05 12:29 +0300) wrote:
>>
>>> Chris Marusich (2016-04-04 03:58 +0300) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> The attached patches add some useful modules for reading RFCs (and STDs)
>>>> in Emacs.
>>>
>>> Overall the patches look good to me, thanks!  But there is a problem
>>> with both packages: the URL of the origin does not point to a versioned
>>> file, so when the author will touch the source, the hash will be changed
>>> and our package will not work anymore.  I suppose there are no mirrors
>>> where we can fetch the "constant" source code, so we probably have to
>>> live with this, but it is a potential problem-maker.
>>
>> Ping for the other reviewers.  I don't know what to do with these
>> packages: on one hand they are unreliable because their hashes may
>> change any time.  But OTOH we already have the same potential problems
>> with 'emacs-mit-scheme-doc' and 'emacs-constants' packages.
>>
>> I personally wouldn't like to include such packages in Guix at all.  I
>> think the only hope with them is that they are dead, so their hashes
>> will not be changed.  Federico, did you have this problem in mind when
>> you packaged them?
>
> Of course I did and I agree it is annoying.
>
> 'emacs-constants' has not been changed in a long time because it is
> kind of "done". I've recently sent a patch to the author and took the
> occasion to mention to him that it would help us to have versioned
> releases. He accepted the patch, but I think he is not into archiving
> old versions. So probably this package will soon break, but it will be
> a matter of fixing the hash (and maybe again in a few years).
>
> In any case, from my point of view, proposing to drop packages is not
> very constructive. A more helpful approach would be to find a place
> where we could archive specific versions of packages with this kind of
> problem. I know that people here do not particularly like GitHub, but
> possibly a similar place/service could do.

Yeah, it would be perfect.  Perhaps some day we'll have some kind of
"Guix archve" for this purpose.  OK, so I'm applying these patches to
master.  Sorry for the delay, Chris, and thanks for contributing!

-- 
Alex