Re: Importers as independent packages?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Martin,

Martin Becze <address@hidden> skribis:

> I have been working on a recursive importer that uses semantic
> versioning over on #38408. It relies on guile-semver. I'm not exactly
> sure how to add guile-semver as a dependency to guix. But I'm also not
> sure that I should. Importers will probably not be used by the majority
> of end users so would it make sense to put the importers in their own
> package? This would also nicely solve recursive-import-semver's problem
> of being dependent on guile-semver. 
>
> Also in the future it would be nice if the crate import could read from
> a Cargo.toml directly (this will make importing things like alacritty
> much easier since it is not crates.io), which would probably mean have
> yet another dependency (guile-toml). What do you think about this Guix?

Good question.  In the end, ‘guix pull’ takes care of providing the
right dependency: guile-gcrypt, guile-json, guile-git, etc.  So here it
would just be a matter of telling (guix self) that the importer modules
depend on guile-semver in addition to the rest.  (Likewise, configure.ac
and Makefile.am may have to check whether guile-semver is available.)

IOW, it seems that we’re already set up to handle such things, as in
“guix pull” will do the right thing.

If, in the future, we end up having too many dependencies for developer
tools like importers, we might need to consider changing “guix pull” so
that it no longer pulls them in by default.  I think we’re not there
yet, though.

Thanks,
Ludo’.