Re: How to get the package metadata as structured data?

[Catonano]

2016-08-10 13:46 GMT+02:00 Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden>:

Philippe Ombredanne <address@hidden> writes:

> David Craven <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I aborted, since I realised that guix package -s doesn't include the
>> source url and hash, which would be important for a testsuite...
>
> IMHO, if the rec data is the only way to get to the packages data, the
> source url would be rather essential to get in.

The recutils output is not the *only* way to access the package data.
All packages in Guix are just Scheme variables.  Package data are
available as S-expressions and can be read by Scheme programs or parsed
by external applications.  The recutils output is just an additional
format used when interacting with Guix on the command line.

(Personally, I’m not enthusiastic about adding a serialised form of the
source field to the recutils output.)

~~ Ricardo

Not so long ago, someone posted a script that produced a web page with the results of linting all the packages

That's an example

One could produce an xml file to be imported in Gephi, just to make another example.

Or a SQL text file to be imported in some relational db, or a different format to be imported in some not relational db...