On Wed, 13 May 2020, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
--with-commit
Yes, this is niice. ♥
For the sake of argument¹, though, so is --with-source=<actually released and
supported upstream tarball dot tar>.
Somehow erasing that hard distinction is the real winning move.
Kind regards,
T G-R
[1]: Obligatory <https://xkcd.com/1432>.
Heh, I'll take the bait. I also really appreciate how easy we make it for
people to exercise their software freedom and run modified software. How
best to make that possible and balance it with other usability constraints
(e.g. mirror:// urls should be more robust) may vary by package, so I
agree with Leo that some discretion is needed. However, that's not to say
that I wouldn't appreciate some guidance as to our default preference when
there is no package-specific reason to prefer one way over the other.
It seems a bigger problem is when the build method for the git repository
and release tarball are different. In many packages this is because of the
pre-generated autotools build system in the release tarballs. Should we
bootstrap the autotools build system even when building from a release
tarball? As I understand it, autotools has historically been treated this
way in part to allow building on systems without the right version of
autotools, but is that really a problem in Guix? Why should it be treated
differently than other pre-generated artifacts which we rebuild?
Another improvement we could make here is improving the message about
Software Heritage in guix lint. Most of the other messages it emits are
things that the author of a package should consider improving. If the
Software Heritage message is less actionable, let's make that clearer so
that people don't think there is a problem with their package definition.
Best,
Jack