Re: [PATCH] Add yaggo.

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

To be clear (to avoid me being pigeon holed as the guy who wants
something that is not pure), we all agree on the following: We agree
to allow people to use bundler and gems if they want to. We agree that
gems can be packaged in Guix (as long as there is no binary code). And
we agree that we should build packages properly and reproducibly in
Guix. We agree an importer will be helpful. There is no disagreement
that I can tell.

What we have gained in this thread is that we allow ourselves to
construct packages directly from Ruby gems. A clear win for speeding
up building packages.

The only thing we (apparently) disagree on is setting the RUBY_HOME
path to mimic other distribution's behaviour and point it at a
non-immutable directory - to take away a (potential) threshold for
normal users.

Finally, I also have no problem of injecting multiple source gems in
one package, especially if they are not shared between packages. I
don't think that compromises purity. But that is my opinion. We don't
have to do it.

Let's close it at this. I am happy with what we agreed on.

Pj.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 08:56:03AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> > Ricardo's response earlier in the thread has given me some confidence
> > that the gem archives on rubygems.org do qualify as the corresponding
> > source code.  That said, we really cannot use pre-built software under
> > any circumstances, because it compromises the project's goals of
> > reproducibility and the ethics of free software.
> 
> +1
> 
> >> Making it hard(er) to install gems from GNU Guix for normal users will
> >> only slow down adoption. Allow using rubygems for those gems that are
> >> not (yet) supported by us. When enough Ruby people move to using Guix
> >> for their development we may get rid of rubygems altogether. I would
> >> love that. I already got rid of rvm :)
> >
> > I'm not advocating that we prevent users from using 'gem'.  Right now,
> > it is possible for users to 'gem install bundler' and build Ruby
> > applications as they typically would.  I have done so on my GuixSD
> > machine.  So, let's package things the right way and let people just
> > use 'bundler' if they want some other stuff.
> 
> I agree.  As long as the original method of using ‘gem’ and ‘bundler’
> still works I don’t see any need for compromises.  It’s not like we’re
> facing a technical problem we cannot solve.  It’s just that we haven’t
> packaged a lot of Ruby stuff yet; same goes for Java stuff where the
> same reasoning applies.
> 
> >> Nix experimented by converting all gems to Nix packages, that is
> >> another possibility. But I think they proved it is hard and now
> >> defunct (correct me if I am wrong).
> >
> > We of course wouldn't just auto-generate *everything* and dump it in
> > the repo.  There's still the human work of inspecting licenses,
> > writing synopses and descriptions, adding unspecified dependencies
> > (happens a lot), etc.
> 
> And that’s where an importer would be very helpful, so that humans only
> have to check and modify rather than write everything from scratch.