Re: Consolidating Go packages

[Leo Famulari]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 11:19:06AM +0300, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> So to summarize, while it is techincally possible to "build" them, in
> actuality they are used in source code form as part of the build
> process.

That's true for Guix but not if you were building Go software outside of
Guix. In that case they would be compiled and re-used through the use of
Go's built-in memoized cache (it's very similar to what Guix does). It's
basically a limitation or bug in our go-build-system that re-using
compiled Go objects does not work.

> So, either it should be just a "source snippet" or it should be a hidden
> package.

Nobody needs to install these libraries but they should be packages so
they show up in the Guix UI (`guix package --show`). I think we can
treat them like other shared library packages. And there is currently
some "building" from our point of view — a package-specific filesystem
hierarchy is created.