Anybody please help improving rust crates importer

[Hartmut Goebel]

Hi,

can anybody please help improving the crates importer? My guile skills
are far to poor and my time is to limited. Help is appreciated!

Why the crates importer needs to be improved

rust is still an young language and many rust packages (crates) still
have 0.x versions. Also crates use semantic versioning and describe
dependencies the same way. Thus, when importing or updating a package,
the packager has to validate *every* dependency manually.

To give you a number: When updating seqouia-pgp, one new dependency was
added, which introduced 151 dependencies - each of which need to be
checked and adopted *manually*.

How the crates importer needs to be improved

  *

    Automatically add the semantic version base to the package's
    variable name (e.g. rust-aaa-1, rust-aaa-0.7). This is stupid work,
    currently to be done manually. Anyhow, this should be easy to implement.

  *

    When creating the package sexp, refer to each dependency using its
    semantic versioned variable name. This is stupid work, currently to
    be done manually. Anyhow, this should be easy to implement, once the
    next point is done.

  *

    When looking up dependencies, follow the semantic version
    requirement. Looking this up manually is the most elaborate, stupid
    work - and it is demotivating.

  *

    When checking whether a dependency is already packaged, take the
    semantic version into account. This is another demotivating,
    elaborate work, done by the computer much faster ans less error-prone.

Anybody taking up this job? I can provide more details, e.g. links, API
end-points, etc.

(Side-note: I'm not a rust developer, I'm just trying to make
sequoia-pgp and pEp available for guix.)

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |