On 30/6/26 15:18, Arun Isaac wrote:
It is very hard to programmatically edit S-expressions while still
preserving comments and whitespace correctly.
I started out with the assumption that it was simply a matter of
using `read` and `pretty-print`. But, no: `read` discards all comments
and whitespace.
The other day I discovered "read-with-comments" and
"pretty-print-with-comments" in guix/read-print.scm, but I have not yet
used them myself.
Then, `pretty-print` prints it out in a way that may be
very different from the way the user had originally formatted the file.
I was thinking maybe we should go for a 'canonical' way to format these
files? Something like black or clang-format, but for scheme; such a
tool does not seem to exist though.
The YAML files you are referring to also have a canonical format.
The reason I discovered those earlier mentioned functions is because I'd
like to get `guix style` to the point that we use it on all packages.
Because I think that would be the first step to improving the automation
of our package maintenance.
