Re: A pleasant low-hanging fruit

[Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com>]

The mind boggles... Awesome.


Alex

On Tue,   5 Mar 2013, 19:47:21 GMT, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I just had a brain wave and couldn’t resist: commit ef010c0 changes
> ‘guix package --install’ such that, when installing a GNU package, it
> automatically reports the availability of a new upstream version.
> 
> So, for instance, if you run it today:
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> $ ./pre-inst-env guix package -i idutils -n
> [nothing special here]
> 
> $ ./pre-inst-env guix package -i gettext -n
> gnu/packages/gettext.scm:27:3: note: using gettext-0.18.1.1 but
> gettext-0.18.2.1 is available upstream --8<---------------cut
> here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> Isn’t it cool?   :-)
> 
> This is fast (~1 sec.), except for packages like GCC with many versions
> and a deep FTP tree structure (~1 m!).   It’s a rare operation, so it
> doesn’t have to be blazingly fast, but definitely faster than for GCC.
> Room for improvement.
> 
> The next step is to offer the option to automatically install from the
> upstream tarball, by downloading it and substituting it in the ‘package’
> record.   The only bit that is missing for this is a GPG keyring of GNU
> maintainer keys so that we can automatically authenticate tarballs (I’ve
> asked Karl about this.)
> 
> The next next step is some fancy stuff that, upon successful
> installation of the new upstream version, offers to automatically submit
> a patch for inclusion in Guix.   This way, every user would end up
> participating in the maintenance of the distro in a simple yet effective
> fashion.   :-)
> 
> Ludo’.
>