Re: Parameterized packages

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Hi ison!

ison <address@hidden> writes:

> Maybe the current discussion is trying too hard to emulate Gentoo's USE
> flags and dependency graph concept (perhaps its my fault for bringing up
> global flags). But that feels like introducing "side effects", and maybe the
> whole idea should be treated more "functionally" in Guix.
>
> That is, simplify the problem to the mere concept of passing arguments to
> functions and nothing more. Take the headless server example: some parameter
> is passed to a package such as
> '("-X")
> That package would then be entirely responsible for what to do with them. If
> the package decides not to pass the same parameters to its inputs then the
> inputs are simply built without any parameters.

Yes, I am starting to come to a similar conclusion.
I think this makes more sense in terms of maintainability.

What that in mind, maintenance would still get more complex than it is
today: a package with N parameters would have 2^N possible outputs.
It quickly gets hard to test them all.  That said, we can probably assume
that in most cases parameters won't conflict with each other.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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