From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ricardo Wurmus Subject: Re: [PATCH] ui: 'package->recutils' serializes the source field. Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 15:42:59 +0200 Message-ID: <87twesd9jw.fsf@elephly.net> References: <87eg60g79l.fsf@gnu.org> <87a8gog154.fsf@gnu.org> <87vazcce0a.fsf@gnu.org> <87r39zcfkz.fsf@gnu.org> <871t1zoz98.fsf@gmail.com> <87invbc6hn.fsf@gnu.org> <87ziombyrx.fsf@gnu.org> <87popglv3u.fsf@gnu.org> <87lh04ltg2.fsf@gnu.org> <32ade0cc-b971-a3fa-ea92-9b313955a373@uq.edu.au> <4e35f009-ba71-f430-65e6-e986365b0c77@uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:47326) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bXTms-0000VZ-VW for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:43:15 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bXTmp-0003kT-MZ for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:43:14 -0400 Received: from sender163-mail.zoho.com ([74.201.84.163]:24843) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1bXTmp-0003jz-Cq for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:43:11 -0400 In-reply-to: <4e35f009-ba71-f430-65e6-e986365b0c77@uq.edu.au> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Ben Woodcroft Cc: guix-devel , Alex Kost , David Craven Ben Woodcroft writes: > On 10/08/16 22:27, David Craven wrote: >>> I don't have anything to to contribute beyond psuedo-quoting Ludo: let's not lose our hair over this! >> I'll let the fact that that could interpreted as being insulting slide. >> > > Oh, no that wasn't my intended meaning. I just saw this thread getting a > bit heated in general and I wanted to help it in the reverse direction, > for all concerned. That's all. I agree, let’s cool it a bit please. Aside from the possible FDSG issue (which I need to think about before forming an opinion, although I’m leaning towards not seeing it as a problem), I’m not yet convinced that all fields need to be printed in recutils format. For programmatic access to packages we recommend using the Scheme values directly as they also hold additional information about the location of a value in the dependency graph (package expressions are code, not plain meta-data). I always understood the recutils output to be just a user interface for the command line, which is why it doesn’t need to and probably shouldn’t print *all* fields. I think it is not desirable to show that much more information in the output, because it is not a programming interface but primarily a user interface. Even so, if one insisted on using the recutils output in a programmatic fashion (e.g. in a bash script), it would be best to run “guix build --source” on the package names to obtain the actual source tarballs that are used by Guix. What would be the point of printing a URL that is not necessarily used by Guix directly? “guix build --source” (which can be used in bash scripts) already provides the *actual* tarball (patched and with snippets applied), so this would be more meaningful than an upstream URL, in my opinion. What do others think? ~~ Ricardo