Re: hpcguix-web, channels, and inferiors

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> Yes I agree.  I wonder though: is there a way to know if a specific
>>> derivation is a package?
>>
>> In general no.  Of course one could play trick to try and guess whether
>> it corresponds to a package, but that should be avoided IMO.
>
> I wonder if we should work towards specifying a type for derivations.
> This could be useful for the user interface to be able to clearly
> distinguish grafts from full package builds.
>
> Currently, there’s no way to tell if the derivations listed under “These
> derivations will be built” are expensive package builds or just simple
> graft derivations.

Indeed.  A simple trick would be to (ab)use the environment variable
part of derivations as a property list, the way Nix has traditionally
done it (see ‘user+system-env-vars’ in (guix derivations)).

So we could have, say, a ‘hint’ environment variable, and the UI would
use that to determine if it’s a graft.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.