Re: Prototype for using Guix with python packages

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> For a few months now, I've been assembling a prototype for how packages
> could be produced for software released as Python source distributions
> (sdists) [1].

Woow, quite an achievement!  Do you know how many of the automatically
generated packages built from source flawlessly?

IIRC, ‘guix import pypi’ currently produces templates that can require
extra tweaks, although that was improved by reading metadata from
Wheels.

How does sdist metadata differ from PyPI or Wheels metadata?  Is it
generally more complete, or of better quality?

> I will also try to look at how what I have been doing could be used to
> improve the Guix PyPI importer and the Python build system, as well as
> submit the packages that are currently just in the guix-env.scm file in
> the repository (pyguile, libsolv) for inclusion in Guix.

That would be awesome!  Anything towards making the output of ‘guix
import’ work out of the box would be great.

> I'm quite excited by the possibilities offered by approaches like this,
> and was wondering if anyone has feedback, questions, opinions, or if
> anyone is working on something similar?

That reminds me of the “recursive importer” that has been discussed a
few times and is currently implemented (but not in master yet) for the
CRAN and NPM importers.  Perhaps your work could be somehow integrated
to get a recursive PyPI/sdist importer?

An idea would be to automatically put all the imported packages into,
say, ~/.cache/guix/python, and add that to GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH.  Then we
could run “guix import pypi --update” to update it, or something like
that.

Thanks for sharing!

Ludo’.