Hi Christopher and Raghav, On +2020-12-05 21:54:36 +0000, Christopher Baines wrote: > > Raghav Gururajan <raghavgurura...@disroot.org> writes: > > > Hi Mark! > > > >> Meanwhile, you've only provided a rationale for 1 out of 3 of the kinds > >> of changes made in these commits. > >> > >> Do you have an explanation for why you are removing comments in your > >> "cosmetic changes" commits? For example, the following two commits > >> remove comments that explain why 'propagated-inputs' are needed: > >> > >> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=c3264f9e100ad6aefe5216002b68f3bfdcf6be95 > >> https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=416b1b9f56b514677660b56992cea1c78e00f519 > >> > >> What's your rationale for doing this? Am I the only one here who finds > >> this practice objectionable? It's not even mentioned in the commit logs. > > > > I think the comments are useful for non-trivial cases. In these > > definitions, the inputs were propagated because they were mentioned in > > .pc files. Propagation because of pkg-config is trivial. So I removed > > the comments. > ┌──────────────────────────────┐ │ "So I removed the comments." │ └──────────────────────────────┘ Raghav, I think you may not grok the social signalling of a statement like that :)
It sounds like you are overlooking the _social_ need for consensus in modifying a shared environment. Taking a picture off the wall of a shared living room is different from taking the same picture off the wall in your private room. A git commit in a jointly developed FLOSS project is modifying a shared living room. (But do what you like in your own git repo ;-) The social aspect is not about the technical merits of of your changes, it's about the difference between joint ownership and private ownership, and the differences in exercising owner rights. > In the context of writing Guix packages, propagating the necessary > inputs to support other packages finding the library via pkg-config is a > serious thing, not trivial. If it breaks, dependent packages will likely > change in behaviour or stop building entirely. > > As for the comments, personally, I think the reasons behind propagated > inputs are individual enough and important enough to each package that > it's useful to write them down, even if that comment is "these things > are referenced by the .pc file". That way others looking at the package > definition don't have to wonder or try and dig through the Git history > to find information about what's going on. > > Anyway, I think the most useful output from this discussion is amending > or adding to the packaging guilelines to cover this: > > https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Packaging-Guidelines.html -- Regards, Bengt Richter