Re: 02/02: gnu: libical: Add upstream patch to preserve API compatibility.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Marius Bakke <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Howdy!
>>
>> address@hidden skribis:
>>
>>> +               (list (origin
>>> +                       (method url-fetch)
>>> +                       (uri (string-append
>>> +                             "https://github.com/libical/libical/commit/";
>>> +                             
>>> "ae394010c889e4c185160da5e81527849f9de350.patch"))
>>
>> IIRC, those generated patches are not stable, like generated tarballs,
>> no?  What are the available options?
>
> I haven't seen GitHub change such generated patch files yet[*], but I do
> agree it's "fragile", because they can be difficult to reproduce when
> GitHub inevitably disappears, or _do_ change the format.

Yeah, I remember Cgit would include its version number in patches, for
instance.

> I wonder if it's feasible to use Guile-Git to generate the patches
> instead, at the expense of having to download the entire repository
> for the purpose of extracting one or more (substitutable) patches.

Good question.  We could have a lowerable <git-commit> data type that
would (1) clone the repo, and (2) dump the raw (?) commit to #$output.
It’s happening on the build side, like ‘git-fetch’, so it could use Git
directly, which supports shallow clones.

Sounds like it could work!

Ludo’.