Re: Removing package input labels: last call!

[Gabriel Wicki <gabriel@erlikon.ch>]

Hi!

I hope I'm not too late!  I've given the patch a try and have a couple
of questions:

 - Since not all the inputs *have* to be converted to the new format:
   is this more some kind of syntactic sugar and less of a "we really
   want this to be the new standard" kind of improvement?
   Or is the goal to replace *all* input lists with the new style?

 - Regarding the speed of the transition: do I understand correctly that
   the script should be able to convert the vast majority of packages
   and that afterwards maybe other definitions will/might/could be
   translated by hand?
 - Follow up: is your intention to adjust the script to work with more
   and more package definitions or are you leaning into a more "let's
   have a sound script which is useful for many cases but leaves a
   biggish bunch of manual labor but at least it won't break a thing"
   kind of solution?

 - Is there a way to check the integrity of a package definition
   *without* building the whole thing?  I had some ideas (see below)
   for adding special cases to your `guix style` script but was unable
   to test whether they actually work (because compiling tonnes of
   codes unsurprisingly takes quite some time).


What I found:
 - Small things like libX11 vs libx11.  If I understood correctly the
   new patch series takes care of this case.

 - I think there's a whole class of cases where version-names and
   other package-definition specifics make the "does-the-package-name-
   match-the-label-exactly" algo fail:
    - ,python-wrapper vs. "python"
    - ,python-minimal-wrapper vs. "python"
    - ,python2 vs. "python"
    - ,python-cython vs. "cython"
    - ,iproute2 vs. "iproute"
    - etc

I've written some code and tested it with some specific package
definitions but since I was unable to test whether these substitutions
actually work for *all* package definitions I'll just leave these
remarks here :)


I hope this is somewhat help- or useful.

Gabriel