Re: [RFC] Package of Nomacs

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 17:13, Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 31.12.2020, 16:37 +0100 schrieb Rovanion Luckey:

> > > Use git-fetch instead and don't recurse into submodules.  You will
> > > likely encounter some errors, because it doesn't seem as though
> > > nomacs
> > > expects you to have its inputs properly packages.  *sigh*
> >
> > Hmm, this one I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind. I think
> > I read in some packaging guidelines that url-fetch was preferred if
> > possible.
> The reason is two-fold: First, it seems to me, that this is a github-
> generated tarball, which have been known to be unstable.  Second, the
> tarball includes a large number of 3rd party sources already packaged
> in Guix.  Most of them are git submodules, so by using a non-recursive
> checkout you can strip them without much effort.
>
> url-fetch is to be preferred, when there is a sane tarball to fetch.
> Most projects only hosted on github don't have that, but certain large-
> scale projects (such as GNU itself or GNOME) do host tarballs.  It also
> enables mirror:// URLS, which translate to a number of hosts, the first
> of which to successfully provide a package is chosen.

In addition, Git repos are easy to archive on Software Heritage (and
fallback); "guix lint -c archival" save the source and then "guix
build" fetches from SWH if the upstream has disappeared in the
meantime.  The story about tarballs is more complicated: the archiving
is almost automatic now but the fallback does not work (yet!) even if
disarchive [1] is really promising.

1: https://git.ngyro.com/disarchive/tree/README


All the best,
simon