Re: [PATCH 1/4] lint: Add packages with suffix ':bin' to 'inputs-should-be-native'.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <address@hidden> skribis:

> On 2016-07-21 18:06, address@hidden wrote:
>>>>   (inputs `(("somethingsilly" ,glib "bin")))
>>
>> This "somethingsilly" is just a label that allows you to refer to an
>> input on the build side, in idioms like:
>>
>>   (assoc-ref inputs "somethingsilly")
>>   => "/gnu/store/…-glib-42.0-bin"
>
> I remember writing something like
>
>   (inputs `(("libuuid" ,util-linux)))
>
> once, to indicate that libuuid really is all we need and that one
> could swap out util-linux for another — extremely hypothetical —
> libuuid provider.
>
> Was this, in hindsight, somethingsilly? :-)

I think it’s fine, but a comment would work well too.

> If so, is there still a reason to keep all this duplication around?

Build systems haven’t migrated yet to gexps.  There’s a branch to do
that, ‘wip-build-systems-gexp’, but there’s a performance regression
compared to what we have, which is why I have not merged it.

That’ll happen, someday, but even then, I’m not sure we’ll remove
labels; at least we won’t remove them overnight, for sure.  ;-)

>> This predates g-expressions, which solve this problem more elegantly.
>
> Interesting! I always assumed[1] gexps were one of the foundations for
> Guix since day 0.

In an ideal world it would have been this way.  :-)

Ludo’.