bug#44863: Warning about importing a MELPA package

bug#44863: Warning about importing a MELPA package

[Zhu Zihao]

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ELPA importer supports MELPA[1] currently. But MELPA is a rolling
archive, which does not persist any old version tarball of
package, and harmful for reproducible build.

It's still useful for Guix packager to import package from MELPA to
draft a sketch of Emacs package, but it's not a reliable download
service. We may better warn user don't submit package which download url
belongs to MELPA. Maybe emit warning while executing `guix import elpa -a
melpa XXX`, or writing this rule to manual.

[1]: the stable archive is "MELPA stable", I use term "MELPA" to refer
to the unstable one.

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Zihao

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bug#44863: Warning about importing a MELPA package

[Carlo Zancanaro]

On Wed, Nov 25 2020, Zhu Zihao wrote:
> ... We may better warn user don't submit package which download 
> url belongs to MELPA. Maybe emit warning while executing `guix 
> import elpa -a melpa XXX`, or writing this rule to manual.

I submitted a patch a while ago to make the MELPA importer pull 
the latest git commit (at the time of import) and use that as the 
source. The importer has to do a bit more work (eg. appropriately 
setting #:files in the Guix package).

You can find my patch at https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/38769 
but unfortunately it no longer applies cleanly to master. I'll 
take a look at fixing it up.

bug#44863: Warning about importing a MELPA package

[Carlo Zancanaro]

On Mon, Dec 07 2020, Carlo Zancanaro wrote:
> ... unfortunately it no longer applies cleanly to master.

Actually, I think I was wrong about this. I must have done 
something wrong when I tried to apply the patch before sending my 
email. When I tried again it worked, and it seems to be fetching 
the git references properly.