Re: some questions about GUIX

[Sam Halliday]

Hi Ricardo,

I have a few more questions about your proposed jar packaging.

Ricardo Wurmus writes:
> We are building library for library as individual packages in Guix. We
> certainly won’t bundle prebuilt jars from Maven if it can be avoided
> at all.

Does this mean that you have a GUIX package for every jar? If so, can
you have multiple versions of the same jar installed at the same time?
Support for multiple versions of a library will be necessary as it is
not always a simple case of bumping the version to use a library: many
libraries introduce breaking changes at both source and binary level.

Will you be using the same version names as the official upstream
binaries? I strongly recommend against doing this. The convention in
corporate environments is that rebuilds of jars incur a postfix to their
version. E.g. a rebuild of guava 18.0 (even with no changes to the
sources) would be 18.0-guix1. Of course, there is no way for you to know
that jars are not being loaded by name at runtime through the
classloader, so you introduce further opportunity for bugs here.


-- 
Best regards,
Sam

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