Re: Accuracy of importers?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net> skribis:

>> 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.

Right.  PyPI/setup.py/.whl doesn’t contain info as to how to run tests,
right?

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

Did the updater suggest input changes?

>>    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 :)

Yay!

>>    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.

Yeah.

> 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.

That’s a good idea.  I can try and do that on a sample of packages.

Thanks!

Ludo’.