Hi,
I am wondering, what are the disadvantages for making fields of records thunked? I can come up with just one, that the error messages are harder to read. Am I missing something? Recently, I came upon few use cases where it would be handy for me if more fields were thunked. So I am thinking if we could make them thunked, or not. Specifically: - operating-system bootloader field I came upon this use case when trying to make the Guix installer and VM image work on AArch64. Since AArch64 dooes not support grub-pc, the bootloader has to be changed for the grub-efi-bootloader, but for x86_64 we want the grub bootloader. It would be nice if I could just check the target in the bootloader field. - operating-system packages field Similarly to the bootloader use case, specifically for the installer grub is put into the packages field and it would be nice if one could filter the supported packages. - package source field qemu is failing to build on some AArch64 machines, see <https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/issues/2447> after a patch has been removed from the source snippets. One workaround would be to reinstate the snippet, but just for AArch64. We could do this in a phase, but the source is already made for adding such snippets. Also, even though this is not a use case Guix channel would have (I think, although I think it was discussed for some architecture there could be bootstrap binaries, like for Rust, where some architectures are unsupported? I might be misremembering), there are users that are downloading binaries and putting them to source, these binaries are different for each architecture. Currently one has to go around this and 'hack' the source by putting it to inputs and reworking the phases to pick it up. Maybe there are more fields I haven't considered. In the end even if the fields aren't thunked, there are ways around this, so it's not such a big deal. While these reasons might not be completely justfied, they still seem like somewhat valid advantages we would enjoy when these fields would be thunked. And in case there is no disadvantages to weigh them to get in the negatives, could we add these fields as thunked? Rutherther
