On 8/7/26 16:21, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
Hi Hugo,
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).
Yes the Python ecosystem it is pretty bad.
But from the positive side: this is also the reason why Python-people
come to Guix.
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
Thanks.
Now, Nixpkgs, again, is not CRAN; it is the largest *and* most
up-to-date distro. We can learn from them.
I think their primary advantage is that Nixpkgs has more people. About
10x as much it seems.
Secondly, it seems all packages have an explicit set of maintainers.
For example their onnx has two maintainers, and those maintainers are
only maintainer of a handful of packages each.
Adding a new package to Nix requires you to either become a maintainer
yourself, or find someone who is willing to adopt the package.
No need for irony; please keep in mind we’re trying to have a respectful
tone in Guix.
I was not even trying to be ironic! Borderline maybe, sorry.
I was referring specifically to the work of developing and improving
tools to automate some of the package maintainance work.
Yes that is the plan. I would not complain this loudly without being
willing to put in the work.
But understand that this is quite a lot to ask from people:
- they need not just to add/update the packages they need,
- not just fix the 100s of dependents that break during such an update,
- but also improve the tools to make managing the dependents manageable.
And on top of that, they must do all that work by hand.
This is a valid approach. Maybe it even works.
But I feel we are taking this too lightly. People will want to have
some time left to actually use the packages :-).
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'll trust you on that. I do feel amazed at what has been collectively
achieved already.
At the same time I feel like we are putting the cart before the horse.
I feel that this "last mile" you talked about w.r.t. the tooling will be
very long.
Did someone ever make a plot to see how out-of-date our packages are
over time? Might be interesting to see whether we are on the right track.
I hope that makes sense to you!
Thanks for your message.
Hugo
