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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Jack Hill <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sun, 24 May 2020, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
> […]
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> What message would you suggest?
>
> How about expanding section 7.7 "Invoking Guix Lint" in the manual to
> include a paragraph of advice in the explanation for each checker. For
> example, the advice could be could be "change the source to use
> git-fetch" for "source-unstable-tarball", "exercise judgment on the
> long-term availability of software sources. We think that code hosted
> on the GNU ftp servers will be around for a long time, but code on
> people's personal websites may not be. The greater the risk of the
> software disappearing, the more important is is to use git-fetch in
> sources so we can trigger archiving at Software Heritage" for
> "archival", and "double check whether these inputs really should be
> native [link to appropriate section of the manual]. If they really
> need to be, leave a comment in the code briefly explaining why to help
> future contributors" for "inputs-should-be-native".

Regarding the ‘archival’ checker, the manual explains what’s at stake
and what it does:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-lint.html

I feel like there’s little room for improvement here.

Ludo’.