Re: Guix Data Service - Outreachy: questions about render-compare/derivation

[Christopher Baines]

Luciana Lima Brito <lubrito@posteo.net> writes:

> I'm lubrito on Guix IRC, the Outreachy applicant.
>
> I'm working on the json output for the render-compare/derivation
> procedure (controller.scm).

Hi lubrito,

Good to hear from you.

> I would like to know if I am on the right path with what I've
> accomplished until now.

You've got some JSON being rendered, so you're definitely on the right
path :)

> The attached .ppm file shows the json I have so far. The json is
> showing only the data for the "outputs", but I already got the data for
> the rest and I could do the same to them. I am still thinking about how
> to make the code cleaner, because the way I'm doing could produce many
> redundancies.
>
> I also would like to know if the general structure of the json is
> correct or if it should be different. For example, under "outputs" "0"
> is denoting base and "1" is denoting target.
>
> The current code for the function is here http://sprunge.us/mKkzX2

So, there's no "correct" structure for the JSON, but some structures
might better represent the data than others, there's a number of factors
to balance.

I think an object with base and target names would easier to understand
than using an array.

Some of the types in the JSON are a bit off as well, part of this is the
query processing is not working quite right, but that's a different
issue. For the JSON you've got so far, I'd specifically look at the
hash, hash-algorithm and recursive fields. hash and hash-algorithm are
only set for some outputs (only for fixed output derivations), it would
probably be better to have these fields set to null if they don't have a
string value, or not included in the object. For recursive, that's a
boolean, so it should be a boolean in the JSON too.

Hope that helps!

Chris

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