Re: language-specific packages

[Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in>]

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On 2024-03-02 23:20, Hartmut Goebel wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
> a few days ago you planed (but canceled) to stream about management of 
> Elixir projects with Guix and why it's better not to package 
> language-specific packages with Guix.
>
> I still have ejabberd in my pipeline which would add quite some Erlang 
> and Elixir packages to Guix. Thus I would be eager to learn your ideas 
> prior to pushing these packages to Guix. May I ask you to share your 
> thoughts?! Thanks.

Hi Hartmut!

I canceled the stream, but made a video on transitive package management
and used elixir and mix for demonstration purposes in it:
https://diode.zone/w/vCvgAWuTCruYuhCJ2ZccTh
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=s3VO9Kb0sHw

My point is that packaging libraries and other language-specific
packages (which are not needed for any mainstream software) cause more
harm than good: it increases maintanance burden, makes the repository
and channel bigger, version bump commits more frequent, operations on it
slower, the code base harder to grasp due to sizes.

If the package is needed for development it should be created from lock
file of the language's package manager (if it provides all needed
information like dependencies, checksums).

It's my personal opinion, not the one of Guix project.

-- 
Best regards,
Andrew Tropin

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