Hello Guix,

I am thinking of expanding the Guix package specification DSL
to support arbitrary property queries to specify package variants,
e.g. hello@2:out?foo&bar=baz.

The most prominent use case for this is probably language implementation
or framework version like lua=5.4 or qt=5.  Not only this encourages
such metadata to be present as package-properties, it's also convenient
for guix shell invocations, since there's no longer the need to guess
where the namespace's version number goes in the name:

    guix shell [email protected] lua-{lgi,penlight}?lua=5.4
    guix shell qt{base,svg}?qt=5

These specific problems has been recently separately raised
on Codeberg (and I thought email is a bit more suitable
for this kind of open-ended discussion, hence this thread):

- Lua: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/6977
- Qt: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/issues/7489

Full disclosure, I'm maintaining a collection of bugs, which often
reveiled by sanitizers.  It'd be lovely too if the buggy packages
could be referred to as something like [email protected]?asan.

This is usually not an issue on the base Guix channel
because build variants like bootstrap and for-tests are hidden though.

What do y'all think?

Cheers,
Phong

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