Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add glibc-locales variants for older versions of glibc.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

>>> * gnu/packages/base.scm (make-glibc-locales, make-glibc-utf8-locales): New
>>> procedures.
>>> (glibc-locales): Express in terms of make-glibc-locales.
>>> (glibc-utf8-locales): Express in terms of make-glibc-utf8-locales.
>>> (glibc-locales-2.27, glibc-utf8-locales-2.27): New variables.
>
> […]
>
>> I don’t like the package name trick, but I don’t have a better solution.
>> Perhaps we could have a special property to explicitly allow for several
>> versions of this package in the same profile (say
>> ‘allow-multiple-versions?’), but that’s a bit more work.
>
> I also don’t like to work around this by changing the package names.  I
> thought of allowing multiple versions via property, but it’s not clear
> how it should behave.  I’d want to have only major versions appear as
> non-conflicting and still prevent the installation of variants of the
> same version.
>
> The next question then is if the property should be a procedure that
> takes the current and the potentially conflicting package as arguments
> and decides whether they are conflicting, or if this should be handled
> centrally when the property is present.

Would there be other use cases?  If not, I would not worry too much
about the major vs. non-major conflicts.

I have a slight preference for a property that we can ‘write’, which
would simplify for instance interaction with inferior packages, hence
something like a Boolean ‘allow-multiple-versions?’ property.

As a first approach, when this flag is true, the version check in
‘check-for-collisions’ could be bypassed.  The property would have to be
added to the <manifest-entry> though, so that the flag is honored even
after several “guix package” invocations.

How does that sound?

Thanks,
Ludo’.