Re: ’inherit’ and list-dependent (was Re: branch master updated: gnu: emacs: Add TREE_SITTER_GRAMMAR_PATH support.)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> On dim., 12 févr. 2023 at 01:14, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>>> There is an idea to update guix refresh --list-dependent to handle the
>>> case with inherited packages as well.  WDYT?
>>
>> Unfortunately, it’s not possible because inheritance info isn’t
>> available at run time.
>
> Well, with the current implementation of ’inherit’, which is just
> copy/paste at the record level, indeed it is not possible to detect some
> relationship.
>
> However, we could imagine to use ’package/inherit’ or another variant
> instead of plain ’inherit’ for creating these inherited packages.  Doing
> so, we could collect some information, e.g., in the field ’properties’,
> which could be used then by --list-dependent.

In effect that means keeping back the chain of inherited objects, which
would lead to space leaks.

> Many of us are bitten by this.  I remember a recent update of Git which
> also missed the dependency of git-minimal. :-)

I agree it’d be nice to solve.  I can’t think of a good way to do that
though.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.