From: Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz>
To: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
Cc: "Christopher Baines via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU
System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>,
Sarah Morgensen <iskarian@mgsn.dev>
Subject: Re: Can we find a better idiom for unversioned packages?
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2021 22:03:47 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87ilzhifz0.fsf@yoctocell.xyz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YTJOycpTs2RpPXZ0@jasmine.lan>
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On Fri, Sep 03 2021, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 06:11:46PM +0200, Xinglu Chen wrote:
>> The date does give an idea of how old the version is, compare that to a
>> random string of 7 characters. If a user wants to know the exact
>> commit, they can always just run ‘guix edit PACKAGE’ and check the
>> ‘commit’ field in the source of the package.
>
> That's true.
>
> However, it's not easy to figure out which revision of guix.git produced
> a package that is installed in a profile.
‘guix describe’ would show the commit of the guix.git repo used,
wouldn’t it?
> The transformation from package definition to built package is lossy.
> You cannot take a built package and ask Guix "which guix.git commit was
> used for this?"
>
> So, if I have a package foo-0.0.0-1-2021-12-31 in my profile, it's
> impossible to reliably trace that back to the correct Guix package
> definition and then discover what upstream source code it was built
> with. [0] On the other hand, if the package's version includes the Git
> commit, it's trivial.
Good point, I don’t really have a good solution to that.
> So, I think we each have different needs that we want satisfied:
>
> 1) To know how old the package's source code is
> 2) To know what source code a built package is based on
>
> The second item is something I do often, and I think a lot of Guix
> developers do it too. And in general, it's imporant for store paths to
> include meaningful "version" information; a date is not meaningful in
> this sense. So let's be careful not to lose that ability by removing
> commit IDs from the package versions.
>
> We can satisfy both of these by adding the date to the version string,
> although we should be careful not to risk exceeding Linux's shebang
> length limit (127), which sometimes will crop up if packages provide
> shebang-able interpreters. The store path needs to be short enough that
> the "bin/foo" part does not make the absolute path exceed 127
> characters. This is something that was addressed while designing the
> current versioning for VCS snapshots.
I didn’t know Linux had this weird(?) restriction, but yeah, it will be
something to think about.
> I'm still skeptical of the utility of adding a date, given the lack of
> useful time information conveyed by Git, but if people really want it
> and it can be made to work, then we should go ahead.
If the date is not part of the version string, I think that there should
at least be a comment saying the the date of the commit, just to let
other people quickly see how old the version is.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-09-03 20:04 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 34+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-08-31 19:57 Can we find a better idiom for unversioned packages? Sarah Morgensen
2021-08-31 21:20 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-01 12:11 ` Xinglu Chen
2021-09-01 16:29 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-01 13:33 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-01 16:39 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-01 18:34 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-02 14:09 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-02 14:20 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-02 14:34 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-01 19:48 ` Jonathan McHugh
2021-09-01 21:47 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-02 13:32 ` Maxime Devos
2021-09-02 7:53 ` Jonathan McHugh
2021-09-02 9:25 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-01 10:55 ` Xinglu Chen
2021-09-01 15:37 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-01 16:50 ` Xinglu Chen
2021-09-02 16:51 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-02 17:29 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-03 16:11 ` Xinglu Chen
2021-09-03 16:35 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-03 16:57 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-03 20:03 ` Xinglu Chen [this message]
2021-09-04 21:00 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-08 21:15 ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-09-02 17:08 ` Leo Famulari
2021-09-08 21:28 ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-09-08 22:21 ` Jonathan McHugh
2021-09-08 22:38 ` Leo Famulari
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-09-03 5:51 Sarah Morgensen
2021-09-03 21:14 Sarah Morgensen
2021-09-03 22:11 ` Liliana Marie Prikler
2021-09-04 12:32 ` Taylan Kammer
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