Re: Guix size reduction work group

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès 写道：
>> Nope (‘inherit’ is purely syntactic, it doesn’t “live on” at run
>> time.)
>> What would it buy you, though?
>
> In addition to what Gábor mentioned, ‘guix refresh -l’ rebuild numbers
> can be dangerously misleading when inheritance is involved.
>
> Would this not be useful information to record?  When I was new here I
> played around with doing just that but my Guile-foo was too weak.

For this specific use case, I agree it would be useful info.

For the more general record use case, I’m skeptical because:

  1. (foo (inherit (foo (a 1)))) would no longer be equal? to
     (foo (a 1)), which makes little sense from a programming viewpoint.

  2. The whole inheritance chain would be kept in memory, when in fact
     ‘inherit’ is nothing more than syntactic sugar to copy a record.

Maybe we could go fancy and augment ‘define-record-type*’ such that one
can ask for “inheritance reification”, but #2 sounds like that could
quickly make it impractical.

Ludo’.