Re: Accuracy of importers?

[Lars-Dominik Braun]

Hi Ludo’,

> My understanding is that most of them require manual intervention—i.e.,
> one has to tweak what ‘guix import’ produces, even if we ignore
> synopsis/description/license, to set the right inputs, etc.  If we were
> to estimate the fraction of imported packages for which manual changes
> are needed, what would it look like?
> 
>    importer     fraction of imported packages needing changes
>    pypi         50% (some miss source distro, “sdist”; some have
>                      non-Python deps)
that seems right, although the most common modification I do nowadays
is replacing 'check with a pytest phase.

>    hackage      ?
>    stackage     (Lars?)
I’ve mostly used the updater, not the importer, so I can’t say a
number unfortunately.

>    cran         5% (Ricardo? Simon? seems to almost always work?)
In my experience the number of interventions here goes towards zero
actually, except for description. It’s pretty good :)

>    npm (WIP)    (Jelle? Timothy?)
Maybe 5%? But the imported packages do not build anything and don’t
run tests either, so chances for failure are pretty low.

Would it be possible to just run the importer again for existing packages
and compare the result (minus synopsis/description) with what’s
available in Guix? That should give you much more accurate numbers than
our guesswork.

Cheers,
Lars