bug#39885: Bioconductor URI, fallback and time-machine

[zimoun]

Dear Ricardo,

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 22:21, Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> wrote:

> >  a) Add the Bioconductor release (known at packaging time) to all the
> > packages; provide as argument to 'bioconductor-uri'.
> >  b) Add more URLs to fallback.
> >
> > As discussed on IRC, Tobias seems more inclined with the option a) and
> > I am more in favour of option b.
>
> I think option a) is more explicit, which is probably what we generally
> want to future-proof the time-machine.  Fallbacks are okay in the case
> of the CRAN URL where it’s not necessarily clear when a package tarball
> moves from the release location to the archive.
>
> In the case of Bioconductor URLs it seems that we can afford to be a bit
> more accurate.

We are going for option a) which means rename all the URLs, right?

Because it is a lot, I suggest to first address the bug#36805, i.e.,
provide as an argument the BioConductor version to 'bioconductor-uri'
and applies this policy to all the new packages or any update of them.

Moreover, I have suggested to reorganise bioconductor.scm,
bioinformatics.scm, cran.scm, etc. and I have not dedicated enough
time to this boring task.  But because I am working remotely
(semi-lockdown), I plan to work on it next week and so this change of
URLs could be part of the big reorganisation.

What do you think?

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36805


All the best,
simon