Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add re2.

[Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com>]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 04:18:48PM +0100, Marius Bakke wrote:
>> Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> writes:
>> 
>> > Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
>> >
>> >> On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 02:05:16PM +0100, Marius Bakke wrote:
>> >>> 
>> >>> I wasn't sure where to put this, so went with its own file. It does not
>> >>> fully implement PCRE so pcre.scm seems inappropriate. Perhaps that could
>> >>> be renamed to regex.scm or similar.
>> >>
>> >> The patch looks good, but please put it in regex.scm! But, I don't want
>> >> to move all the regex packages into this new regex module. Perhaps tre,
>> >> since it appears to have no users in our tree.
>> >
>> > Moved to regex.scm. Thanks!
>> 
>> ..and here is a patch that moves tre.scm over as well. The code is
>> unchanged apart from license: prefix.
>
> When moving packages around, all users of the package need to have their
> module imports updated. Copyright attribution must be carefully handled.
> And merging the various *-updates branches into master and vice versa
> becomes more complicated and prone to error.
>
> I *think* this patch does it right. And it will really grate on my sense
> of aesthetics to have both regex.scm and tre.scm. But, in general, do we
> want to make this change? What does everyone think?

I agree that package moves should be kept at a minimum. Not only does it
make merges difficult, but git log/blame information is also "lost", as
in having to check out pre-move versions to trace the history. It can
also break third-party repositories as I found after tcsh move.

...for this particular package (tre) however, I think a move is
inevitable. It has no in-tree users and will forever stay alone in
tre.scm. It doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to move everything
else though. There are more important things to spend time on right now.