Use development sources more

Use development sources more

[Morgan Smith]

Hello Guix Devel!

I would like to propose that we move towards using sources that resemble
the development sources as closely as possible.

I like to work on Emacs and Emacs packages in my spare time. The Guix
package transformations are gold for this. My workflow is the clone the
source repo, make some changes and commit them, and then use the
--with-git-url package transformation to build and test.

The problem I tend to run into in my workflow, are that packages don't
tend to build from the development source. This is the reason I readded
emacs-next.

For Emacs packages we use elpa even if it doesn't resemble the
development sources.

For example, emacs-modus-operandi-theme and emacs-modus-vivendi-theme
are found in the same upstream repository. If you use the --with-git-url
transformation on either of these packages, you'll get an extra unwanted
file.


Currently I'm looking into building emacs-org from the development
repository, as the release tarball format is significantly different
(and the release doesn't include tests and it'd be cool to run the tests).

Thanks,

Morgan

Re: Use development sources more

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 02:35:50PM -0500, Morgan Smith wrote:
> I would like to propose that we move towards using sources that resemble
> the development sources as closely as possible.
> 
> I like to work on Emacs and Emacs packages in my spare time. The Guix
> package transformations are gold for this. My workflow is the clone the
> source repo, make some changes and commit them, and then use the
> --with-git-url package transformation to build and test.
> 
> The problem I tend to run into in my workflow, are that packages don't
> tend to build from the development source. This is the reason I readded
> emacs-next.

So, in this case, the salient difference between the 'emacs' and
'emacs-next' packages is that emacs-next's source is their Git repo,
whereas emacs uses the release tarball? 

We do base packages on Git repos very often, largely because it
increases the number of packages whose sources are "backed up" by
Software Heritage, and because lots of projects don't offer "real"
tarballs anymore — they may not even have "versions".

Guix is a lot of things but it's primarily a software distribution with
operating system. I think it's important that we distribute the things
that upstream developers intend to be distributed.

Re: Use development sources more

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Morgan,

Morgan Smith <Morgan.J.Smith@outlook.com> skribis:

> I like to work on Emacs and Emacs packages in my spare time. The Guix
> package transformations are gold for this. My workflow is the clone the
> source repo, make some changes and commit them, and then use the
> --with-git-url package transformation to build and test.
>
> The problem I tend to run into in my workflow, are that packages don't
> tend to build from the development source. This is the reason I readded
> emacs-next.
>
> For Emacs packages we use elpa even if it doesn't resemble the
> development sources.
>
> For example, emacs-modus-operandi-theme and emacs-modus-vivendi-theme
> are found in the same upstream repository. If you use the --with-git-url
> transformation on either of these packages, you'll get an extra unwanted
> file.

Like Leo writes, I think it can be a good idea to refer to Git
repositories instead of tarballs provided we refer to release tags, not
arbitrary commits in the project histories.

However, we have to check with the main contributors to emacs.scm and
emacs-xyz.scm whether moving away from ELPA tarballs is feasible and
desirable.  There may be other things at play!

Thanks,
Ludo’.