Hello!

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net> skribis:

> Would it be possible to just run the importer again for existing packages
> and compare the result (minus synopsis/description) with what’s
> available in Guix? That should give you much more accurate numbers than
> our guesswork.

Turned out to be trickier than we could hope, primarily because the
relevant importers did not support imports of a specific version.  I
fixed it for CRAN and PyPI here:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/51493

With the attached script plus the changes above, I can already get some
insight.  Here’s what I get for a sample of 200 PyPI packages and 200
CRAN packages:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ SAMPLE_SIZE=200 ./pre-inst-env guile ~/src/guix-debugging/importer-accuracy.scm
[…]
Accuracy for 'pypi' (200 packages):
  accurate: 58 (29%)
  different inputs: 142 (71%)
  different source: 0 (0%)
  inconclusive: 0 (0%)
Accuracy for 'cran' (200 packages):
  accurate: 176 (88%)
  different inputs: 23 (12%)
  different source: 1 (0%)
  inconclusive: 0 (0%)
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

(It’s quite expensive to run because it downloads a whole bunch of
things and tries many 404 URLs in the case of CRAN before finding the
right one.)

The script doesn’t do anything useful for crates because they have their
own way of representing inputs.  It doesn’t account for changes in
‘arguments’ like zimoun suggested, meaning it’s overestimating accuracy.

It’d be nice to run it on gems but that importer doesn’t support
versioning either.

To be continued…

Thanks,
Ludo’.