A pleasant low-hanging fruit

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

I just had a brain wave and couldn’t resist: commit ef010c0 changes
‘guix package --install’ such that, when installing a GNU package, it
automatically reports the availability of a new upstream version.

So, for instance, if you run it today:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ ./pre-inst-env guix package -i idutils -n
[nothing special here]

$ ./pre-inst-env guix package -i gettext -n
gnu/packages/gettext.scm:27:3: note: using gettext-0.18.1.1 but 
gettext-0.18.2.1 is available upstream
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Isn’t it cool?  :-)

This is fast (~1 sec.), except for packages like GCC with many versions
and a deep FTP tree structure (~1 m!).  It’s a rare operation, so it
doesn’t have to be blazingly fast, but definitely faster than for GCC.
Room for improvement.

The next step is to offer the option to automatically install from the
upstream tarball, by downloading it and substituting it in the ‘package’
record.  The only bit that is missing for this is a GPG keyring of GNU
maintainer keys so that we can automatically authenticate tarballs (I’ve
asked Karl about this.)

The next next step is some fancy stuff that, upon successful
installation of the new upstream version, offers to automatically submit
a patch for inclusion in Guix.  This way, every user would end up
participating in the maintenance of the distro in a simple yet effective
fashion.  :-)

Ludo’.