Re: [PATCH] ui: 'package->recutils' serializes the source field.

[Thompson, David]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 9:42 AM, Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Ben Woodcroft <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On 10/08/16 22:27, David Craven wrote:
>>>> I don't have anything to to contribute beyond psuedo-quoting Ludo: let's 
>>>> not lose our hair over this!
>>> I'll let the fact that that could interpreted as being insulting slide.
>>>
>>
>> Oh, no that wasn't my intended meaning. I just saw this thread getting a
>> bit heated in general and I wanted to help it in the reverse direction,
>> for all concerned. That's all.
>
> I agree, let’s cool it a bit please.
>
> Aside from the possible FDSG issue (which I need to think about before
> forming an opinion, although I’m leaning towards not seeing it as a
> problem), I’m not yet convinced that all fields need to be printed in
> recutils format.
>
> For programmatic access to packages we recommend using the Scheme values
> directly as they also hold additional information about the location of
> a value in the dependency graph (package expressions are code, not plain
> meta-data).  I always understood the recutils output to be just a user
> interface for the command line, which is why it doesn’t need to and
> probably shouldn’t print *all* fields.
>
> I think it is not desirable to show that much more information in the
> output, because it is not a programming interface but primarily a user
> interface.
>
> Even so, if one insisted on using the recutils output in a programmatic
> fashion (e.g. in a bash script), it would be best to run “guix build
> --source” on the package names to obtain the actual source tarballs that
> are used by Guix.  What would be the point of printing a URL that is not
> necessarily used by Guix directly?  “guix build --source” (which can be
> used in bash scripts) already provides the *actual* tarball (patched and
> with snippets applied), so this would be more meaningful than an
> upstream URL, in my opinion.
>
> What do others think?

+1

- Dave