Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add p7zip.

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 01:38:17PM -0500, Eric Bavier wrote:
> On 2016-08-02 02:06, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> > Hi Kei,
> > 
> > > This patch should install p7zip correctly on every architecture
> > > supported by Guix. Ideally, this should be tested it on each arch for
> > > the sake of completeness and safety. I've got x86_64 covered so far.
> > > :-)
> > 
> > thank you for this patch!
> > 
> > I see that you took care of removing non-free parts in a patch and a
> > build phase.  Since “guix build -S p7zip” doesn’t run the build phase
> > users would still end up with a source archive containing the non-free
> > parts.  The best way is thus to remove things in a snippet.
> > 
> > In “shogun” from the “machine-learning” module we remove supporting code
> > for non-free features in a snippet by cutting out anything between some
> > ifdef markers, but looking at the patch I see that it wouldn’t be
> > feasible for p7zip.
> 
> Also note that it is not completely desirable for nonfree code to be removed
> with a patch, and is one of the reasons Guix supports snippets in the first
> place.

Is there a reason to not use a patch in this case? Or can we proceed
with packaging p7zip, using a patch to remove non-free parts?