bug#50606: Add support for other formats of Guix channels

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 16 Sept 2021 at 10:18, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> EuAndreh <eu@euandre.org> skribis:

> > Guix channel authors may want to serve channels:

[...]

> > - via other DVCS like Mercurial, Fossil, BitKeeper;
> > - decoupled from the backing versioning tool.

[...]

> All in all, I’m not in favor of supporting other version control tools
> for channels.

Adding more all to "all in all". :-)

Support other VCS would mean a lot of work: refactor "pull" and then
break several CLIs (pull, time-machine, describe) -- without speaking
about "guix git" subcommand.  I do not know if all the Git concepts
currently used by Guix translate well to other VCS.  Moreover the
transparent recent fallback to SWH for channels would also needs piece
of work -- it is not straightforward to fetch back content from
metadata at hand; it is currently only done for Git source and the
others VCS are still WIP, i.e., they do not work out-of-the-box.
Well, from a pragmatic point of view, I am not convinced that such
effort is worth considering the popularity of Git vs other-VCS.

All the best,
simon