Re: “What’s in a package”

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Katherine,

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

> This is perhaps a rehash of the "worse is better"[2] conversation, but
> I often struggle with deciding whether to do things the "fast" way, or
> the "correct" way. I think when your path is clear, the correct way
> will get you farther, faster. But when you're doing experiments, or
> exploratory programming, being bogged down with the "correct" way of
> doing things (i.e. Guix packages) might take a lot of time for no
> benefit. E.g. maybe you end up packaging a cluster of things that you
> find out don't work out for you. Of course the challenge is: if you
> choose the fast way, and it works out, do you got back to do it the
> correct way so that you're on sound footing?

I can very much relate to this.  PyTorch was one case where I hesitated
between the “fast way” and the “correct way”; I chose the latter
thinking that it would probably be beneficial to others, otherwise you
wouldn’t have heard about it.  ;-)

> Bringing this back to Guix, and maybe the GNU philosophy, it has been
> very helpful for me to be able to leverage the flexibility of Guix to
> occasionally do things the "fast" way, perhaps by packaging a
> binary. Paradoxically, it has allowed me to stay within the Guix and
> free software ecosystem. In my opinion, flexibility is key to growing
> the ecosystem and community, and I would encourage Guix as a project
> to take every opportunity to give the user options.

I agree.  Like Konrad and you wrote, it’s good that we can all have our
quick-and-dirty packages in personal channels, and it’s good that these
are separate channels.

I’m not sure how tooling could help in the way of making quick packages,
but it’s worth exploring.  Examples that come to mind are: merging the
npm importer that currently lives in a branch, and providing a generic
“guix import upstream” importer that would figure out as much as
possible so that one doesn’t have to start from a blank page.

Thanks,
Ludo’.