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

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

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?  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?).  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.  I guess the Ruby build
system needs to be adjusted to do something similar to the shebang
substitution, but for gem paths.  That might be really tough to do
reliably, though.

Sorry that I don't have a better answer right now.  I guess I should
take a look at how Nix handles this.

Thanks for letting me know.

- Dave