Re: GnuPG in Guix

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 06:16:12PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> This is a different issue, but yes, maybe the “old” one should have its
> name changed to “gnupg1”.  What do people think?

I think that is a severe regression and would open a can of worms. If we do
it for one package, why not for all where we have several versions in our
distribution? Or even for all packages... For this, we have the version
number, which we should not duplicate in the name.

For gnupg in particular, notice that it is considered as _one_ project
upstream, with several branches: called "GnuPG stable", "GnuPG modern",
"GnuPG classic".

I think that one of the advantages in guix is that we have generally easily
predictable package names, directly derived from the upstream names.
If I want to install libxext, I can do
   guix package -i libxext
On debian, in contrast
   apt-get install libxext
   E: Unable to locate package libxext
because it is called libxext6.
For gmp, we just do "guix package -i gmp", or "guix package -i gmp-x.y.z".
In debian, there are packages
libgmp10
libgmp10-doc
libgmp-dev
libgmp3-dev
Just because debian cannot install several versions of the same package.
More than once this has unnerved me, and I find the guix way of not messing
with package names really refreshing. It is maybe not revolutionary, but part
of our philosophy of diverging as little as possible from upstream.

That said, I think it would be important to find a solution to the problem
of incidental upgrades, a way of pin pointing packages one does not want
to upgrade to a newer version.

Andreas