An addition to my previous mail. > I don't say that name+version should identify a package, but I think it > would be very convenient to have an ID for a package definition. For > example now manifest may tell that "out" of a "guile-2.0.11" package is > installed but there are 2 "guile-2.0.11" packages out there and it's > impossible to distinguish those. And vice versa when I list available > packages I want to see my installed outputs only for the right packages, > not for all packages with the same name+version. > > What if to make some ‘get-package-by-id’ function that will always > return a single package? And there is no need to add IDs for all > package definitions, as most of them are identified with name+version > already. What I suggest is to add an optional “postfix” field to > <package> record, so that a combination “name+version+[postfix]” will be > unique and will be returned by ‘package-id’ like this: > > (package-id #<package guile-2.0.11 gnu/packages/guile.scm>) ==> > "guile-2.0.11" > (package-id #<package guile-2.0.11 gnu/packages/base.scm>) ==> > "guile-2.0.11_base"
Perhaps it would be better to have a ‘unique-name’ field that defaults to a ‘name’ field if not specified, so ‘unique-name+version’ pair will identify a package.
