Re: Turning off tests leads to a different store item

[Suhail]

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

> On Thu, 02 Nov 2023 at 18:54, Suhail <suhail@bayesians.ca> wrote:
>
>> If our hypothetical build system (say, ds-build-system) were to admit
>> the above invariances, do you foresee some complications that may arise
>> that need to be addressed?
>
> Instead of trying to answer to this question, what comes to my mind when
> reading is:
>
> https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/743-Build_tool_semantic_aware_build_systems

Thank you for that reference. Yes, that's in the right spirit. The
motivational scenario (packaging data science applications) as well as
other specifics are of particular interest to me. From the blog:

> A build system like nix is designed around the idea that builds are
> relatively cheap, and that any change in a dependency ought to trigger
> a rebuild, just to be sure that all build outputs are up-to-date.

In addition to the above assumption, software engineering makes another
assumption that (at times) needs to be relaxed in data science. In
software engineering, the tests are assumed to have a definitive notion
of "pass" vs "fail".  Whereas in data science applications, the "tests"
may not have a definitive "pass" or "fail" semantics and/or may
entertain multiple such interpretations. While I have been calling these
tests so far, perhaps it may be better to call these something other
than that. If so, "statistical report" may be more descriptive.

Regardless, we reach the point where it would help us if we had some
control over defining what is or isn't substitutable for another.

While the blog post is considering this more generally via the use of
"equivalence proxies" (e.g., treat A as being substitutable for B if the
value of the proxy evaluated at A is the same as the value of the proxy
evaluated at B), I am currently limiting myself to the more specific
case where I want to be able to treat A as being substitutable for B
when I am able to define a computation that takes A as an input and is
able to generate B. Note that I am not requiring that I be able to
generate A from B.

So, in Guix, if I want to create a "type of substitute" which instead of
downloading over HTTP/HTTPS runs some other computation how would I go
about doing that?

> and also the paper: Build à la carte
>
>     https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3236774

Thank you for that useful reference.

-- 
Suhail

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