(address . bug-guix@gnu.org)
20211023165702.1e518f56@primarylaptop
Hi,
When I sent the patch adding matterbridge to Guix, I only notified that
I didn't know if it contained vendored code or not at the last moment
(after the patch was sent, during the discussion about it, and before
it was merged).
The issue is that I didn't know go at all and more specifically I didn't
know its the compilation system worked. So I managed to create a
package for matterbridge by looking at how it was done for other go
packages.
After learning more about how go compilation worked, I found out that
matterbridge contained a lot of vendored code.
And Guix explicitly wants to avoid bundles code. In the "16.6 Submitting
Patches" section of the manual[1], we have:
Toggle quote (2 lines)
> 6. Make sure the package does not use bundled copies of software
> already available as separate packages.
And here while most dependencies are not already packaged, some are,
and I guess that I should read between the lines and conclude that all
the matterbridge dependencies should rather be packaged.
So the question is what should we do about that.
As I understand with the go build system, or you vendor all
dependencies, or you vendor none, and I've not yet managed to find a
way to workaround that yet in Guix (to do a progressive unvendoring).
So instead I've started working on unvendoring matterbridge[2]
completely, but if we go this route, there are more than 500
dependencies.
To do that I first used the following command:
guix import go -r github.com/42wim/matterbridge
I then started looking at each package definition that Guix didn't
manage to detect the license of, and I read the licenses to find if
they were free software. All the licenses I read were FSDG compliant.
Usually they had some extra text indicating the provenance of the code
or they would have multiple free software licenses.
Then I started adding packages for the dependencies that guix import go
didn't manage to find.
Theses are repositories that are being forked from the official ones
for a reason or another.
I've not finished that yet, but I still think it was a good idea to
open a bug report as I've now more understanding of the problem.
Given the huge amount of dependencies I was wondering what was the best
approach here:
- Would it makes sense to remove matterbridge from Guix, or should we
fix it instead?
- If we fix it by packaging each dependencies, would it be ok if that
is done step by step, like if dependencies are packaged and patches
for them are sent, without necessarily a way to seriously test if
the packaged dependency work until they are used by other software
(like matterbridge)?
Also when I'll manage to update matterbridge[3] how should we deal with
such amount of packages? Would I need to send one (generated) patch for
the upgrade of each package?
I also guess that sticking as much as possible to what Guix import go
generates would help in situations like that as it would make the
maintenance faster.
References:
-----------
[3]Right now there is a compilation issue that I didn't manage to fix,
even with help from #guix).
Denis.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----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=1Rqb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----