Re: Merging the “binary” NPM importer?

[Christine Lemmer-Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello!
>
> pinoaffe <pinoaffe@airmail.cc> skribis:
>
>> Recently, I made an effort to get the guix-npm binary importer working
>> in combination with a relatively "modern" guix - my changes are rather
>> hacky and I think I may have broken a thing or two, but i got it to work
>> reasonably well in the REPL.
>> (many thanks to Jelle Licht and possibly others who initially wrote the importer)
>>
>> Considering that such a binary importer is probably not well-suited for
>> inclusion in guix-proper, I would like to make it available through an
>> additional channel, mostly for my own use but maybe also for others.
>
> We’ll have to check what maintainers think, but I’ve come to think that
> we could include it in Guix proper, while of course properly documenting
> its shortcomings.
>
> We would probably not include packages made with it in Guix proper, but
> it can still be useful to users who want a way to manage free JS code
> with Guix.  And on top of that, it already exists.  :-)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ludo’.

I think it's a good idea to include it.  It's likely we'd see some
channels appear which start incorporating such things, then.  But of
course we would not want those packages in Guix proper.  But it could be
a "path in".

I seem to remember my time in Debian being that ending up in "contrib"
(or worse, non-free) felt like, okay, now Debian users have an easier
way to use this, but it doesn't feel good.  This seemed to result in a
lot of pressure to end up in Debian main, and lots of packages seem to
have made changes to become eligible to do that.  I think "getting in
Guix proper" likewise can be a positive incentive.