Re: best practise between git-fetch vs url-fetch?

[Jack Hill]

On Wed, 13 May 2020, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:

> > --with-commit
>
> Yes, this is niice.  ♥
>
> For the sake of argument¹, though, so is --with-source=<actually released and 
> supported upstream tarball dot tar>.
>
> Somehow erasing that hard distinction is the real winning move.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> T G-R
>
> [1]: Obligatory <https://xkcd.com/1432>.

Heh, I'll take the bait. I also really appreciate how easy we make it for 
people to exercise their software freedom and run modified software. How 
best to make that possible and balance it with other usability constraints 
(e.g. mirror:// urls should be more robust) may vary by package, so I 
agree with Leo that some discretion is needed. However, that's not to say 
that I wouldn't appreciate some guidance as to our default preference when 
there is no package-specific reason to prefer one way over the other.

It seems a bigger problem is when the build method for the git repository 
and release tarball are different. In many packages this is because of the 
pre-generated autotools build system in the release tarballs. Should we 
bootstrap the autotools build system even when building from a release 
tarball? As I understand it, autotools has historically been treated this 
way in part to allow building on systems without the right version of 
autotools, but is that really a problem in Guix? Why should it be treated 
differently than other pre-generated artifacts which we rebuild?

Another improvement we could make here is improving the message about 
Software Heritage in guix lint. Most of the other messages it emits are 
things that the author of a package should consider improving. If the 
Software Heritage message is less actionable, let's make that clearer so 
that people don't think there is a problem with their package definition.

Best,
Jack