Re: Per-package updaters?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> we have a couple of generic package updaters (CPAN, CRAN, Bioconductor,
> Github, GNU, etc), but they don’t nearly cover all of our packages.  I
> wonder if we should add one-off updaters for individual packages that
> don’t fall into any of the generic classes of updaters.
>
> Another question is how to implement them.  Would there be another
> optional field in package expressions containing a Guile script to run
> to determine updates for the current package?
>
> What are your opinions on this?

Currently we have ways to provide the generic updates with additional
hints.  For instance, we can provide hints to the ‘gnu’ updater:

  (define-public guile-next
    (package (inherit guile-2.0)
      (name "guile-next")
      ;; …
      (properties '((upstream-name . "guile")
                    (ftp-server . "alpha.gnu.org")
                    (ftp-directory . "/gnu/guile")))))

I suspect that one-off updaters would most likely use methods very
close to the existing updaters.  For instance, we could have a generic
FTP updater that would apply to all packages available on FTP; or we
could have a generic updater that crawls HTML pages for release numbers
and such things.  Then we would have optional properties in packages to
specify which method to use, or something along these lines.

WDYT?  Do you have examples in mind?

Cheers,
Ludo’.