Hi Hugo, Hugo Buddelmeijer <[email protected]> skribis:
>> Respectfully, I think you’ve been proven wrong by Guix-CRAN, by >> Nixpkgs, >> etc. We have to be humble and learn from these experiences. > > CRAN is not representative. Less than 9% of the packages in cran.scm > have custom phases or patches. It is presumptuous (as antonym to > humble) to assume that approach works for other ecosystems; more than > 25% of all packages have custom phases or patches. You’re right that CRAN is not representative in the sense that the metadata it provides has higher quality that what’s found on PyPI (the worst of all). I studied the quality of repository metadata some years ago, out of the same concerns: https://codeberg.org/guix/maintenance/src/commit/bbae8005ba113fec3233755ae703de193098e846/talks/packaging-con-2021/grail/talk.20211110.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTOkXlE_ac Now, Nixpkgs, again, is not CRAN; it is the largest *and* most up-to-date distro. We can learn from them. >> having contributed to ‘guix refresh’ and to some of the >> importers/updaters, I find this kind of work pretty fun and challenging. > > It can also be fun and challenging to fix broken packages, and there > is plenty of fun to go around. No need for irony; please keep in mind we’re trying to have a respectful tone in Guix. I was referring specifically to the work of developing and improving tools to automate some of the package maintainance work. > E.g., anyone who'd like to take a shot at refreshing onnx? Onnx is > currently blocking upgrading NumPy (since onnx uses numpy and is > itself used by calibre, which I consider important): > https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/issues/9443 Likewise, I’d just like to point out that I *know* the kind of problem you’re talking about: I have 19 years (ouch!) of packaging experience and I even packaged PyTorch and onnx and their friends: https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2021/09/whats-in-a-package/ That’s enough to fully sympathize with your frustration (really), and also enough to be more optimistic on our collective ability to address many of these problems as they arise. I hope that makes sense to you! Ludo’.
