Re: [PATCH 3/3] gnu: Add ruby-i18n.

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I just noticed this:
>>
>>   $ guix gc --references /gnu/store/whj6j9f34adpzwhfj3qf00fcq9zsb3hp-ruby-i18n-0.6.11
>>   [nothing here]
>>
>> Apparently the .gem is +/- a gzip archive, which makes it opaque to the
>> GC, hence the above result.
>>
>> Is it something we should worry about, or is it fine because .gem files
>> in general don’t won’t hold any reference to something else?
>>
>
> There should be many other files there, too, right?

Yes, notably all the .rb files.

> The Ruby source should be there in plain text.  In the case of the
> i18n gem, it doesn't depend on any external librararies, so there's no
> references to be found since it doesn't directly refer to the Ruby
> interpreter that built the gem (should it?).

This is fine.

> Now, when a gem has other dependencies, my suspicion is that there
> also won't be any references, which is definitely something to worry
> about.

Actually it depends.  I hadn’t noticed, but since all the .rb source
files are there, uncompressed, that means that if a reference is
embedded in the source, it *will* be scanned correctly by the GC.

So maybe there’s no real problem, after all.

Thanks,
Ludo’.