Re: importers and input package lookup

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> skribis:

> there are two, independent namespaces:
> 1) the scheme one, and
> 2) the guix package repository.
>
> when i work on an importer (golang), it skips the packages that are already 
> available in 2), but then it has no clue under what variable name they are 
> stored in 1), and in which scheme module.

Does the variable name matters though?  In general what matters for the
importer is whether the package/version exists, regardless of the
variable name.

> should the dependency lists in the package forms be emitted as 
> (specification->package "pkgname@0.1.0") forms?

No, not for packages in Guix proper.

[...]

> a bit of a tangent here, and a higher-level perspective, but... shouldn't the 
> package definition DSL have support for this? then most package descriptions 
> could be using package specifications instead of scheme variables, and 1) 
> could be phased out. or would that be more error prone? maybe with a tool 
> that warns for the equivalent of undefined variable warnings?

Package specs are ambiguous compared to variable references (they depend
on external state, on the set of chosen channels, etc.) so in general we
want to refer to variables.

HTH!

Ludo’.