Gauche description

Gauche description

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Hi Gabriel!

Thanks for contributing Gauche to Guix!
I've noticed something strange however: in the description, you mention

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
There are currently 58 packages available.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Isn't it shortsighted?  If another package is added upstream, then the
description won't match anymore.

Why mentioning it at all?

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[swedebugia]

On 2019-01-16 09:47, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> Hi Gabriel!
> 
> Thanks for contributing Gauche to Guix!
> I've noticed something strange however: in the description, you mention
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> There are currently 58 packages available.
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> Isn't it shortsighted?  If another package is added upstream, then the
> description won't match anymore.
> 
> Why mentioning it at all?

It was my idea during review. I think it is a good idea to give the user
a hint about the number of available packages that exist in the
ecosystems/package-managers we package.

This is also valid for our python-pip-package etc. Currently this
description does not mention anything about the number available
(164,921 projects as of today).

I agree that specifying the exact number might not be a good idea for
the reason you stated. What about "More that 50 packages are currently
available"?

For pip this would be "More than 164.000 packages are currently
available."

--

This enables the user to quickly get a feel of how many of the total
packages of python are currently in guix: fold-packages... prefix
python: ~1400 out of 164.000 total ~ less than 1% of the python
ecosystem is currently available in Guix thus you could help import more
packages!

-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia

Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Whichever number we provide will go out of date at some point.
It's extra maintenance, and if we only put a rough number (e.g. 100k+) then it's
not really meaningful in my opinion.

Alternatively, we could point at the web index of the packages.
E.g. 
- Pypi: https://pypi.org/
- Gauche: http://practical-scheme.net/wiliki/wiliki.cgi?Gauche%3aPackages
etc.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Gabriel Hondet]

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Hello everyone,

On Wed 16 Jan 2019 at 13:53 Pierre Neidhardt wrote:

> Whichever number we provide will go out of date at some point.
> It's extra maintenance, and if we only put a rough number (e.g. 100k+) then it's
> not really meaningful in my opinion.

While I agree with this statement, I also think that Swedebugia's idea of
comparing the number of Guix-ported packages of an ecosystem with the
total number of packages in this ecosystem is interesting.

Couldn't something like

#+begin_src sh
  guix ecosystem pypi
#+end_src

which would retrieve the number of packages on pypi, compute the number
of pypi packages defined for Guix and output some statistics be done?

Gabriel


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Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions

[swedebugia]

On 2019-01-16 14:52, Gabriel Hondet wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> On Wed 16 Jan 2019 at 13:53 Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> 
>> Whichever number we provide will go out of date at some point.
>> It's extra maintenance, and if we only put a rough number (e.g. 100k+) then it's
>> not really meaningful in my opinion.
> 
> While I agree with this statement, I also think that Swedebugia's idea of
> comparing the number of Guix-ported packages of an ecosystem with the
> total number of packages in this ecosystem is interesting.
> 
> Couldn't something like
> 
> #+begin_src sh
>   guix ecosystem pypi
> #+end_src
> 
> which would retrieve the number of packages on pypi, compute the number
> of pypi packages defined for Guix and output some statistics be done?

+1 

This is way better than including it in the definitions, however we
would probably have to parse the websites to get the numbers we need.

-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia

Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Gabriel Hondet <gabrielhondet@gmail.com> writes:

> Couldn't something like
>
> #+begin_src sh
>   guix ecosystem pypi
> #+end_src
>
> which would retrieve the number of packages on pypi, compute the number
> of pypi packages defined for Guix and output some statistics be done?

I’d prefer not to add a feature like this.

-- 
Ricardo

Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
> I’d prefer not to add a feature like this.

Why not?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>> I’d prefer not to add a feature like this.
>
> Why not?

Lots of reasons.

One reason is that pypi isn’t the only source of Python packages.  Nor
is CRAN the only source of R packages.  There are also package sources
that we fetch from other locations because of problems with whatever has
been published on the more popular repositories (e.g. most of the
rubygems).

I also think it’s not the job of a package manager to tell you how much
software there is in this world and how much of it can be accessed via
the package manager.  What good are those numbers?  What useful
information do they provide?  I don’t think it’s good to clutter the
list of commands (and the documentation) with features of very limited
usefulness.

I don’t like the ways it would work: neither do I want to store and
regularly update lists of remote packages nor do I want to have my
package manager call out to remote web servers.  What about packages
that are not available because they are not free software?

(Finally, I don’t like the use of the word “ecosystem” in the realm of
software.)

--
Ricardo

Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions

[swedebugia]

On 2019-01-16 19:55, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:
> 
>> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
>>> I’d prefer not to add a feature like this.
>>
>> Why not?
> 
> Lots of reasons.
> 
> One reason is that pypi isn’t the only source of Python packages.  Nor
> is CRAN the only source of R packages.  There are also package sources
> that we fetch from other locations because of problems with whatever has
> been published on the more popular repositories (e.g. most of the
> rubygems).
> 
> I also think it’s not the job of a package manager to tell you how much
> software there is in this world and how much of it can be accessed via
> the package manager.  What good are those numbers?  What useful
> information do they provide?  I don’t think it’s good to clutter the
> list of commands (and the documentation) with features of very limited
> usefulness.
> 
> I don’t like the ways it would work: neither do I want to store and
> regularly update lists of remote packages nor do I want to have my
> package manager call out to remote web servers.  What about packages
> that are not available because they are not free software?
> 
> (Finally, I don’t like the use of the word “ecosystem” in the realm of
> software.)

OK. Thanks for stating this Ricardo. Pierre, I'm fine with removing the
sentence with the number altogether.

-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia

Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Done.  Thank you Ricardo for sharing a good rationale around this issue.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: Stating the size of ecosystems in descriptions (Was: Re: Gauche description)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

swedebugia@riseup.net writes:

> On 2019-01-16 09:47, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
>> Hi Gabriel!
>> 
>> Thanks for contributing Gauche to Guix!
>> I've noticed something strange however: in the description, you mention
>> 
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> There are currently 58 packages available.
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>> 
>> Isn't it shortsighted?  If another package is added upstream, then the
>> description won't match anymore.
>> 
>> Why mentioning it at all?
>
> It was my idea during review. I think it is a good idea to give the user
> a hint about the number of available packages that exist in the
> ecosystems/package-managers we package.

I’d prefer to not include numbers like that.

-- 
Ricardo