Re: Guix size reduction work group

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 7 Feb 2020 at 23:31, Gábor Boskovits <boskovits@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> ezt írta (időpont: 2020. febr. 7., Pén 22:36):
>> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

>> >> The thing is, I think it’s something that requires constant care, every
>> >> time we add a package or modify an existing one.  It’s very easy to lose
>> >> benefits that had been previously obtained through hard work!
>> >
>> > I have never thought, neither tried but is it possible to find and/or
>> > build all the packages that 'inherit' from a specific one?
>>
>> Nope (‘inherit’ is purely syntactic, it doesn’t “live on” at run time.)
>> What would it buy you, though?
>
> It is currently easy to break packages by updating a package that is inherited from. You have no way to know about that relationship by simple inspection, and is not discoverable by current tooling either. So I also believe that it would be useful to at least be able to list them. One place where this becomes painful is in bootstrap chains.

Yes, exactly that. :-)


> Do you think this can be achieved somehow without complicating implementation?

Maybe grouping all the packages with the same 'origin'. It should
possible, isn't it?


Cheers,
simon