Hi Ekaitz, Ekaitz Zarraga <eka...@elenq.tech> writes:
> Hi > > I want to forward this message to guix-devel because it is a clear > case of some (actually good) technical decision affecting users in > unexpected ways. > > Now, after the change, a user might run `guix search avr-toolchain` and find > nothing. Same for ARM. > > This is a shame, because we have toolchains for those architectures > but converting them to a function that returns the package leave many > users that are not used to read guix's code thinking those packages > are gone. > > Maybe we should create some kind of fake packages that show up in > `guix show` and `guix search` that have a short tutorial on how to use > packages that come from a function like these. > This way providing the same interface for every package regardless where they > are coming from. > > I leave it as food for thought. There's this series: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/66263 that proposes to still have a module which would include the cross-toolchain as packages again; it'd be in a new module, and as I pointed to in my review we'd need to stress hard that this module is only for convenience and shouldn't be imported anywhere else in the Guix source code (which seems a bit of a slippery slope to me, as people rarely read the module commentary, and rightly assume that any package present in Guix can be used as another package's input). We can't deprecate the package I think, as the replacement is not of the same type (it's replaced by a procedure). A NEWS could perhaps have helped, though it's not as good as a deprecation. -- Thanks, Maxim
