On Wed, Jul 15 2026, Saku Laesvuori wrote: > Now the importer seems to work well enough, but robustness to upstream > change, in addition to simplicity and deduplication of code, was what > made me think about this. I would expect that to also help with > maintainability in some sense.
I don't see any particular reason why every importer needs to be in the Guix repository. I wrote https://sr.ht/~czan/guix-ruby/ to solve the related problem of writing manifests for Ruby projects that work nicely with Bundler (which lots of Ruby projects use to manage their dependencies). My approach is to write a Ruby program which uses the Bundler API to parse the relevant files. It then computes the URLs/hashes (by calling Guix), and emits a Scheme source file. Given the output of an importer is Scheme code, there's nothing stopping someone writing an importer as a Haskell program and using the Cabal library. Looking at the code in guix/upstream.scm, it might even be possible to write some glue code in Scheme so adding it as a channel would make it work with "guix refresh". Carlo
