bug#26373: [PATCH 6/6] import cran: Skip updating when meta data cannot be downloaded.

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:
>
>> * gnu/packages/bioinformatics.scm (latest-cran-release,
>> latest-bioconductor-release): Abort early when meta data cannot be downloaded.
>> ---
>>  guix/import/cran.scm | 6 ++++--
>>  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/guix/import/cran.scm b/guix/import/cran.scm
>> index 557d694ad..fc7a1ed84 100644
>> --- a/guix/import/cran.scm
>> +++ b/guix/import/cran.scm
>> @@ -398,7 +398,8 @@ dependencies."
>>      (package->upstream-name package))
>>
>>    (define meta
>> -    (fetch-description 'cran upstream-name))
>> +    (false-if-exception
>> +     (fetch-description 'cran upstream-name)))
>
> I would prefer catching only the relevant exception.  So I suppose
> something like:
>
>   (guard (c ((http-get-error? c)
>              (if (= 404 (http-get-error-code c))
>                  #f
>                  (raise c))))
>     (fetch-description 'cran upstream-name))
>
> However I see that ‘fetch-description’ already does that, so what
> exceptions are we protecting against?

I don’t know what the desired behaviour here is.  When updating
packages, I think it’s good to keep going.  If there’s an error
downloading the package meta data I want “meta” to be “#f”, which leads
to skipping the update.

Without turning errors to “#f” I wasn’t able to just update all packages
with “guix refresh -t cran,bioconductor -u”.  That said, I don’t like
this.  I feel that it would be better to add a “--keep-going” option for
“refresh” and implement it in the shared updater code rather than here.

--
Ricardo

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