[bug#59592] (No Subject)

[Charles via Guix-patches via <guix-patches@gnu.org>]

> Adding everything to 'asd-systems' would be tedious. 

We can agree on that point.

> I think Guix package definitions are not the right place to keep the 
> complete list of available ASDF systems (just like we don't keep the 
> list of ".so" C libraries in package definitions).

But where is a better place? I was planning to open up the conversation 
about doing just that for C libraries 😁 (and executable binaries, and
python packages, and rust crates, and so on).
 
> There's a file search functionality that is being developped (there's
> some info about it in the guix-devel mailing list I think). Maybe it
> could be used as a base for a script searching for ASDF systems.

This one: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2022-12/msg00234.html
Subject: "File Search".

I have a couple gripes with that approach:

1. It only searches for files (using a file database). This makes it hard to 
differentiate searching between different types of files. This also makes it 
hard to search for something like an asdf system which might not be associated 
with a file on a 1 to 1 basis.

2. It only index the searchable stuff after building the packages. This raises
a whole lot of issues mentioned in that thread already (networking, privacy, etc.).
My approach would make the information available at the time of guix pull in the
package definition.