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* Treating patches as part of ‘origin’
@ 2013-09-15 21:05 Ludovic Courtès
  2013-09-15 23:05 ` Alex Sassmannshausen
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 8+ messages in thread
From: Ludovic Courtès @ 2013-09-15 21:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: guix-devel

Hello!

We had an interesting discussion on the gnu-linux-libre list [0], where
we identified an issue wrt. honoring the free system distribution
guidelines (FSDG).

The problem boils down to the fact that ‘guix build --source’ returns
the unmodified upstream tarball.  This is a problem because that may not
correspond to what we’re effectively building, when there are patches;
also, we may be delivering non-FSDG-compliant software source to the user.

To address that, I think we should move patch handling from the build
system to the ‘origin’ objects.  That is, we would write:

  (package
    ...
    (source (origin
              (uri ...)
              (sha256 ...)      ; hash of the upstream tarball
              (patches (map search-path (list "foo.patch" ...)))))
    ...)

As a bonus, this would make patches work regardless of the package’s
build system; we would get rid get rid of the #:patches arguments to
‘gnu-build-system’.

I think the effect of having a non-null ‘patches’ list should be to
fetch the upstream tarball, apply the patches, and re-pack the tarball.
That way, patching would be completely transparent to build systems
(they would always get a tarball, regardless of whether it has been
patched) and to the user (‘guix build --source’ would always return a
tarball.)  The only downside is the CPU cost of re-making the tarball,
which could be annoying when working on a package, but I think it’s
reasonably low for most packages.

From an FSDG perspective, that means that we should do things like
removing non-free software (as in netpbm) and software that does not
comply (like TeX Live’s ‘getnonfreefonts’) preferably in the form of a
patch, rather than as a ‘substitute*’ statement or similar.

What do people think?

I’ll go ahead and implement that in ‘core-updates’ if there are no
objections.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2013-10-10 21:24 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2013-09-15 21:05 Treating patches as part of ‘origin’ Ludovic Courtès
2013-09-15 23:05 ` Alex Sassmannshausen
2013-09-16 10:31   ` Ludovic Courtès
2013-09-18  7:35 ` Andreas Enge
2013-09-18 21:36   ` Ludovic Courtès
2013-10-08 22:18 ` Ludovic Courtès
2013-10-09 21:39   ` Ludovic Courtès
2013-10-10 21:19   ` Ludovic Courtès

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