Hello Guix! Here’s a proposal for a soft revolution: getting rid of input labels in package definitions. Instead of writing:
(native-inputs `(("autoconf" ,autoconf) ("automake" ,automake) ("pkg-config" ,pkg-config) ("guile" ,guile-3.0))) one can write: (native-inputs (list autoconf automake pkg-config guile-3.0)) With this patch set, this is just syntactic sugar: ‘package-inputs’ and friends still return a list of tuples. (These patches are against ‘core-updates’ but that works equally well on ‘master’, without a world rebuild.) My understanding of the code is that this change adds no overhead for packages written in the old style, and negligible overhead for packages written in the new style (calling ‘package-name’ instead of referring to a literal string for the label.) I haven’t tried to measure it though as it would require a massive conversion to the new style to be really measurable. I don’t think I need to expound on the benefits. :-) There are issues and open questions: • This hides labels, but they’re still visible as soon as one fiddles with ‘package-inputs’ & co. So this lowers the barrier to entry, but the difficulty of dealing with input tuples does not disappear entirely. • Both styles would be supported for a long time so contributors would still have to know about input tuples anyway. • There are packages that use custom labels as some sort of an abstraction. For instance, the “kernel-headers” label is associated either with ‘linux-libre-headers’ or with ‘hurd-headers’. In this case, the simplified style would use the package name as the label, which isn’t appropriate, or at least would require adjustments in packages that rely on this. • There are packages with same-named but different inputs, and they rely on having a different input label. • Some packages rely on labels that differ from the package name (this is what the ‘guix lint -c input-labels’ patch detects). For instance, commencement.scm has things like: `(("guile" ,%bootstrap-guile)) Automatic labeling would convert it to: `(("guile-bootstrap" ,%bootstrap-guile)) Not necessarily a problem: we can keep the old style for these. Common Lisp packages typically lack the “cl-” prefix in input labels but most likely they don’t actually refer to those labels, so we should be fine. • Packages such as ‘tzdata’ use labels to refer to non-package inputs. These cannot be converted to the automatic labeling style, or not without extra changes. • Currently, something like: (inputs (list glib)) is converted to: (inputs `(("glib" ,glib))) Should it, instead, be converted to: (inputs `(("glib" ,glib) ("glib:bin" ,glib "bin"))) ? This would make the concise style strictly less expressive, but maybe good enough? Ludovic Courtès (4): records: Support field sanitizers. DRAFT packages: Allow inputs to be plain package lists. DRAFT gnu: Change inputs of core packages to plain lists. DRAFT lint: Add 'input-labels' checker. gnu/packages/base.scm | 30 +++++++-------- gnu/packages/guile.scm | 87 ++++++++++-------------------------------- gnu/packages/mes.scm | 23 ++++------- guix/lint.scm | 35 +++++++++++++++++ guix/packages.scm | 35 +++++++++++++++-- guix/records.scm | 65 ++++++++++++++++++++++++------- tests/records.scm | 38 ++++++++++++++++++ 7 files changed, 198 insertions(+), 115 deletions(-) -- 2.31.1