On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Alex Kost <alez...@gmail.com> wrote: > Alex Kost (2016-04-05 12:29 +0300) wrote: > >> Chris Marusich (2016-04-04 03:58 +0300) wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> The attached patches add some useful modules for reading RFCs (and STDs) >>> in Emacs. >> >> Overall the patches look good to me, thanks! But there is a problem >> with both packages: the URL of the origin does not point to a versioned >> file, so when the author will touch the source, the hash will be changed >> and our package will not work anymore. I suppose there are no mirrors >> where we can fetch the "constant" source code, so we probably have to >> live with this, but it is a potential problem-maker. > > Ping for the other reviewers. I don't know what to do with these > packages: on one hand they are unreliable because their hashes may > change any time. But OTOH we already have the same potential problems > with 'emacs-mit-scheme-doc' and 'emacs-constants' packages. > > I personally wouldn't like to include such packages in Guix at all. I > think the only hope with them is that they are dead, so their hashes > will not be changed. Federico, did you have this problem in mind when > you packaged them?
Of course I did and I agree it is annoying. 'emacs-constants' has not been changed in a long time because it is kind of "done". I've recently sent a patch to the author and took the occasion to mention to him that it would help us to have versioned releases. He accepted the patch, but I think he is not into archiving old versions. So probably this package will soon break, but it will be a matter of fixing the hash (and maybe again in a few years). In any case, from my point of view, proposing to drop packages is not very constructive. A more helpful approach would be to find a place where we could archive specific versions of packages with this kind of problem. I know that people here do not particularly like GitHub, but possibly a similar place/service could do. Regards, Fede