Re: Faster “guix search” (was Re: How many bytes do we add (closure of guix) when adding one new package?)

[Attila Lendvai]

> It makes zero sense to load full package definitions from disk for
> most queries, such as guix search, with an SoA representation we
> could load only the fields that we care about.


i'd like to quickly point out something while we are discussing this:

when i came to guix it was rather confusing that there two namespaces through 
which one can get hold of a package object:

1) module-global variables in the scheme module system

2) a reified repository of packages (i.e. a scheme hash table, and some lookup 
functions).

these two namespaces are quite indepenedent from each other, and there are no 
formal rules that govern the relationship between the two.

there are scheme variable reference in some places, some others issue a call to 
SPECIFICATION->PACKAGE, manifests do that implicitly (?), etc. my gut feeling 
is that there is potential here for unification and simplification, without 
limiting composability.

-- 
• attila lendvai
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