Re: gnumaint changes

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Mike Gerwitz <mtg@gnu.org> skribis:

> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 17:57:01 +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Mike Gerwitz <mtg@gnu.org> skribis:
>
> [...]
>
>>> Do you have a couple examples of what you think would be beneficial to
>>> pull form Guix?  I'm certainly open to the idea where it makes sense;
>>> there's no sense in us duplicating effort within GNU unnecessarily.
>>
>> I realize that Guix doesn’t have all GNU packages yet so in fact there’s
>> not so much to pull from at this point.  I was suspecting blurbs are
>> likely to be more up-to-date in Guix, but that’s very subjective, I
>> don’t know if this is the case.
>
> It seems like the blurbs in Guix may be slightly different: in Womb they
> are provided by the package author for use here:
>
>   https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html
>
> In Guix they may be augmented with additional information that the
> Guix package author finds useful, and may deviate from what the GNU
> package author provided.  Is that true?

In theory, yes, but ‘guix lint’ warns when this happens.

(IME package authors provide the initial blurb, but very few GNU people
actually know about the Womb and the fact there’s a blurb for their
package their.  Back when I looked more closely at this, it was often
Brandon or John who’d take care of providing blurbs.)

> It makes sense to me, though, that Guix and that page would be in
> sync.  But if the intent is to have the blurbs be written by the package
> authors, syncing them would mean that Guix would forefit the ability to
> manage its own package descriptions.  I'm not sure if that's something
> Guix would want to do.

Yes, we’ve been doing that from the start, but occasionally, people
would like to amend blurbs, and I point them to the Womb, but it’s a bit
cumbersome; no big deal, but not as fluid as could be.

> I'm also unaware of how many GNU package maintainers even remember that
> the blurbs page even exists.  So it's possible that such descriptions
> could be updated.  It'd be worth maintainers@ occasionally asking
> package maintainers to review our records.

Yeah.

>>> I'm also working on automating parts of our recordkeeping: in the next
>>> few weeks, Womb will have up-to-date version information automatically
>>> pulled from info-gnu release announcements; the FTP server; and a couple
>>> websites where necessary, though I'll be manually committing it for the
>>> first few months to verify that it is all working properly.  So Guix
>>> might also be able to depend on rec/gnupackages.rec for checking for new
>>> releases as well, since unfortunately GNU doesn't mandate the use of the
>>> FTP server, or even info-gnu (so releases are all over the place).
>>
>> The (guix gnu-maintenance) modules are tools to retrieve the latest
>> version of a GNU package by traversing its ftp.gnu.org (or similar)
>> directory.  That’s something you might find useful.  Here’s an example:
>
> Thanks---I was going to reference Guix's implementation.
>
> But do note that many GNU packages don't make use of GNU's FTP server,
> so this doesn't work on its own as a comprehensive version check
> tool for GNU software.  But if this hasn't been a practical problem for
> Guix yet, then there's no need to change that.

Like I said it uses a different method and URL for packages not on
gnu.org.

Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.