Re: [PATCH] gnu: password-store: Wrap PATH.

[Mathieu Lirzin <mthl@gnu.org>]

Alex Griffin <a@ajgrf.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 29, 2016, at 09:02 AM, Thompson, David wrote:
>> Sorry I'm late, but I don't think this is the right fix.  

Sorry for not letting you the time to respond.

>> Wrapping programs should only be considered after other options are
>> exhausted.  The correct fix is to patch the source directly to refer
>> to executables by their absolute path.  Why wasn't it done this way?
>
> Mostly because it would be a lot of on-going work every time the package
> is updated. As a shell script, it invokes an external tool nearly every
> other line. If you look at the discussion that happened in February when
> the package was first added [1], Jessica (the original packager) was
> really discouraged by the prospect of patching every invocation of an
> external tool. She also tried to submit changes upstream so that kind of
> work wouldn't be necessary, but upstream wasn't very receptive to the
> idea. In the end, the package was just committed to Guix in a broken
> state.
>
> Another approach I considered was adding a bunch of shell aliases to the
> top of the script pointing to the Guix store. That makes the problem a
> lot more tractable than replacing every external invocation, but it's
> still kinda complicated and it still requires finding every single
> program that gets called and keeping it up to date with new releases. So
> even if all upstream does is use another program from coreutils, the fix
> would be out-of-date again.
>
> [1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-02/msg01310.html

This makes sense to me.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin