Re: Source tarballs from PyPI versus tarballs from the individual project websites

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> skribis:

>>> One concern is, what about the tooling for telling us when updates to
>>> packages are available?
>>
>> ‘guix refresh’ works for PyPI but not for arbitrary sites.
>
> Why not let 'guix refresh' use PyPI to detect package updates, and then
> let somebody manually find the equivalent upstream tarball URI and put
> it in the package definition?

The problem is that the PyPI “updater” that ‘guix refresh’ uses needs to
be able to determine that a package is a “PyPI package”, which is what
the ‘pypi-package?’ predicate in (guix import pypi) does.  If a package
uses a URL other than pypi.python.org, that predicate returns false.

Ludo’.