Re: “What’s in a package”

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Katherine Cox-Buday <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> skribis:

> That sounds like a great start. I tossed out some other ideas elsewhere in 
> the thread. Most of them involve meta-inspection of the package, Guix 
> ecosystem, runtime environment and logs. It would be nice in general to have 
> a kind of "agent" that you could run repeatedly over the course of packaging 
> that would suggest next steps on ~stderr~ and next logical packaging 
> definition on ~stdout~. Kind of like pair-programming with Guix :)
>
> It would perform different operations dependent on what stage in the 
> life-cycle the package is at, i.e. ~import~ when no package definition 
> exists, build when one does, and possibly running the result in a container 
> when the package build succeeds.
>
> E.g. your PyTorch example, starting from scratch (note: ~guix import~ may not 
> always feel like the right command to invoke in this example. This may be 
> some larger concept than import; also, the example always redirects to 
> package.scm for brevity, but the user would probably want to look at it 
> first):
>
> #+begin_example
>   $ guix import upstream pytorch
>
>   stderr: This looks like it might be python package (heuristics.scm:123 - 
> package name starts with py), try this instead:
>   stdout: guix import upstream pypi pytorch

[...]

I like these ideas!

> etc., etc. Typing that out, it feels dangerously close to Microsoft's Clippy, 
> but hopefully more helpful :)

Heh, Clippy was cute.  ;-)

> Heuristics, by definition, wouldn't be correct all the time, but this kind of 
> thing could help new contributors (or experienced contributors with bad 
> memories like me!), and in some cases actually do some of the programming.
>
> And every time someone comes to the mailing list or IRC with a question, we 
> can ask ourselves if this is a common question, and maybe create a new 
> heuristic.

Agreed.

Let’s see if we can get there…

Thanks,
Ludo’.