Re: Questionable "cosmetic changes" commits

[Christopher Baines]

Raghav Gururajan <raghavgururajan@disroot.org> writes:

> Hi Mark!
>
>> Meanwhile, you've only provided a rationale for 1 out of 3 of the kinds
>> of changes made in these commits.
>> 
>> Do you have an explanation for why you are removing comments in your
>> "cosmetic changes" commits? For example, the following two commits
>> remove comments that explain why 'propagated-inputs' are needed:
>> 
>> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=c3264f9e100ad6aefe5216002b68f3bfdcf6be95
>> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=416b1b9f56b514677660b56992cea1c78e00f519
>> 
>> What's your rationale for doing this? Am I the only one here who finds
>> this practice objectionable? It's not even mentioned in the commit logs.
>
> I think the comments are useful for non-trivial cases. In these
> definitions, the inputs were propagated because they were mentioned in
> .pc files. Propagation because of pkg-config is trivial. So I removed
> the comments.

In the context of writing Guix packages, propagating the necessary
inputs to support other packages finding the library via pkg-config is a
serious thing, not trivial. If it breaks, dependent packages will likely
change in behaviour or stop building entirely.

As for the comments, personally, I think the reasons behind propagated
inputs are individual enough and important enough to each package that
it's useful to write them down, even if that comment is "these things
are referenced by the .pc file". That way others looking at the package
definition don't have to wonder or try and dig through the Git history
to find information about what's going on.

Anyway, I think the most useful output from this discussion is amending
or adding to the packaging guilelines to cover this:

  https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Packaging-Guidelines.html

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