Re: Accuracy of importers?

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> writes:

> 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
>
>    gnu          90% (doesn’t know about dependencies)
>    pypi         50% (some miss source distro, “sdist”; some have
>                      non-Python deps)
>    cpan         ?
>    hackage      ?
>    stackage     (Lars?)
>    egg          (Xinglu?)
>    elpa         (Nicolas?)

The elpa importer is accurate. Manual changes are often (I would say
around 75%) required for the description field, tho.

However, the generated source URI is not reliable (see bug #46849),
which means the importer is not practical. Using it means the imported
package will need to be updated quickly.

> Among those, which importers provide source that differs from what you’d
> get from upstream’s checkout or release tarballs?  My guess:
>
>    pypi (see LastPyMile paper)
>    elpa (gives hosted tarballs that can differ from upstream repo)

Indeed.

>    gem (similar to PyPI)
>    npm (ditto)
>
> What about licensing info: which ones provide accurate licensing info?
> My guess:
>
>    gnu
>    pypi
>    cpan
>    cran
>    elpa

Correct

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou