Hello Guix! As I’m preparing my PackagingCon talk and wondering how language package managers could make our lives easier, I thought it’d be interesting to know how well our importers are doing.
My understanding is that most of them require manual intervention—i.e., one has to tweak what ‘guix import’ produces, even if we ignore synopsis/description/license, to set the right inputs, etc. If we were to estimate the fraction of imported packages for which manual changes are needed, what would it look like? importer fraction of imported packages needing changes gnu 90% (doesn’t know about dependencies) pypi 50% (some miss source distro, “sdist”; some have non-Python deps) cpan ? hackage ? stackage (Lars?) egg (Xinglu?) elpa (Nicolas?) gem ? go (Sarah? Leo? Raghav?) cran 5% (Ricardo? Simon? seems to almost always work?) crate 10% (Efraim?) texlive (Ricardo? Thiago? Marius?) opam (Julien?) minetest (Maxime? Vivien?) julia (WIP) (Simon?) npm (WIP) (Jelle? Timothy?) (Lower is better.) What would be your estimate? Among those, which importers provide source that differs from what you’d get from upstream’s checkout or release tarballs? My guess: pypi (see LastPyMile paper) elpa (gives hosted tarballs that can differ from upstream repo) gem (similar to PyPI) npm (ditto) What about licensing info: which ones provide accurate licensing info? My guess: gnu pypi cpan cran elpa go (?) cran crate (?) texlive opam (?) minetest (?) TIA! :-) Ludo’.