Re: SWH and lookup (bug?)

[zimoun]

Hi Ludo,

On Fri, 29 Oct 2021 at 16:57, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Right now Sway’s origin refers to the “1.5.1” tag.
>
> I found the problem:

Wow!  Thanks for sharing.

> The solution is to implement pagination (yuk!), or to use an endpoint to
> look up a branch by name instead of using ‘snapshot-branches’ (is there
> such an endpoint?).

Maybe, the solution is to drop referring by tag and only use commit.  As
you proposed elsewhere [1]:

        No, I think we should consider always referring to commits
        instead of tags.  It’s annoying from a readability viewpoint,
        but it would ensure reproducibility.  Even flatpak has this
        policy.  :-)

          https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/App-Requirements

Although, it would be hard and a lot of work for switching, it would
solve many of lookup issues.

At least, we could refer to commit instead of tag in ’origin’ for these
specific packages.  Bah, it is inelegant. :-)

Note that using another endpoint via SWHID could be an option.  As
discussed here [2].  For instance, the lookup would use Disarchive-DB.
On one hand, it would ease coverage and so on.  On the other hand, it
means rely on another service — it does not appears straightforward when
speaking about long-term support; although Disarchive-DB is somehow a
Git repo, i.e., archival on SWH is more or less easy, but it is still
missing a mechanism to locally fallback is this very service is down.
Well, the story is not complete yet. ;-)

1: <https://yhetil.org/guix/87mtmr2a3t.fsf_-_@gnu.org>
2: <https://yhetil.org/guix/87h7cz29r4.fsf@gnu.org>

Cheers,
simon