[bug#60630] [PATCH] guix: channels: Add description field.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"jgart" <jgart@dismail.de> skribis:

>> Right, I agree. What use case did you have in mind, jgart?
>
> See the search that we are building here:
>
> https://toys.whereis.みんな/

Woow, very nice!  We definitely need that kind of tool.

There might be interesting stuff to borrow/share with hpcguix-web, in
particular the bit the periodically updates channels from which packages
are displayed.

> toys is a channel webring in the form of a web API. It currently allows 
> searching for public symbols (parses docstring info if available), services, 
> and packages across the Guix channels that are part of the webring 
> channels.scm file: 
> https://git.sr.ht/~whereiseveryone/toys/tree/master/item/channels.scm
>
> We'd like to be able to have a standardized way to get a channel description 
> in the same way that we have a standardized way to get a description or 
> synopsis of a package.
>
> In other words, we want to make it easy to describe each channel for the 
> users that subscribe to that channel or are browsing channels for stuff that 
> they might want to use.

Right, so I think this could go in <channel-metadata> and
‘read-channel-metadata’, which is what reads ‘.guix-channel’.  To
support i18n, we might want to have a format similar to that of channel
news files.

As additional metadata, we might want to add a link to a logo, to a
substitute server, substitute key, and things like that, as in:

  https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/website/-/blob/master/channels.scm

So I’m closing this one and looking forward to addressing this!

Thanks,
Ludo’.