Mike Gerwitz transcribed 3.7K bytes: > On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 17:57:01 +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > > Hello, > > > > Mike Gerwitz <m...@gnu.org> skribis: > > [...] > > >> Do you have a couple examples of what you think would be beneficial to > >> pull form Guix? I'm certainly open to the idea where it makes sense; > >> there's no sense in us duplicating effort within GNU unnecessarily. > > > > I realize that Guix doesn’t have all GNU packages yet so in fact there’s > > not so much to pull from at this point. I was suspecting blurbs are > > likely to be more up-to-date in Guix, but that’s very subjective, I > > don’t know if this is the case. > > It seems like the blurbs in Guix may be slightly different: in Womb they > are provided by the package author for use here: > > https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html > > In Guix they may be augmented with additional information that the > Guix package author finds useful, and may deviate from what the GNU > package author provided. Is that true?
Yes. And for that reason I would not like that they are picked from Guix. The package authors should keep the autonomy to decide what's right as a description. In Guix we change the descriptions (blurbs) according to our needs. > It makes sense to me, though, that Guix and that page would be in > sync. But if the intent is to have the blurbs be written by the package > authors, syncing them would mean that Guix would forefit the ability to > manage its own package descriptions. I'm not sure if that's something > Guix would want to do. > > I'm also unaware of how many GNU package maintainers even remember that > the blurbs page even exists. So it's possible that such descriptions > could be updated. It'd be worth maintainers@ occasionally asking > package maintainers to review our records. > > >> I'm also working on automating parts of our recordkeeping: in the next > >> few weeks, Womb will have up-to-date version information automatically > >> pulled from info-gnu release announcements; the FTP server; and a couple > >> websites where necessary, though I'll be manually committing it for the > >> first few months to verify that it is all working properly. So Guix > >> might also be able to depend on rec/gnupackages.rec for checking for new > >> releases as well, since unfortunately GNU doesn't mandate the use of the > >> FTP server, or even info-gnu (so releases are all over the place). > > > > The (guix gnu-maintenance) modules are tools to retrieve the latest > > version of a GNU package by traversing its ftp.gnu.org (or similar) > > directory. That’s something you might find useful. Here’s an example: > > Thanks---I was going to reference Guix's implementation. > > But do note that many GNU packages don't make use of GNU's FTP server, > so this doesn't work on its own as a comprehensive version check > tool for GNU software. But if this hasn't been a practical problem for > Guix yet, then there's no need to change that. > > -- > Mike Gerwitz > Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer > GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B 2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05 > https://mikegerwitz.com
