On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 01:26:03AM +0000, fis trivial wrote:
> Oh, sorry I didn't know about that.  Tarball feels cleaner than setting up a
> git repo (just a feeling).  I will send another patch using git soon.

Yeah, I agree with you. Git is a huge and complicated package. It's
annoying that the packages depend on it.

> But isn't those tarball now everywhere in Guix?  It would be a huge headache.

Yes. Previously we favored the GitHub tarballs, but in September 2017
GitHub caused a large number of them to change, and it was a big
headache for us and many other distros.

GitHub's recommendation is to use Git checkouts or for upstream projects
to upload their own tarballs to their project's GitHub release page. [0]
GitHub doesn't guarantee their automatically generated tarballs will
remain identical in the future.

So, for packages where the upstream maintainers do not upload their own
tarballs, we are slowly changing our package definitions to use Git
checkouts.

[0] You can see an example of the difference between the upstream
project's own tarballs, and the tarballs automatically generated by
GitHub, on the Borg release page:

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases

The file named 'Source code (tar.gz)' is automatically created by
GitHub. It may change in the future. The file named
'borgbackup-1.1.7.tar.gz' is uploaded by Borg's maintainers, and it
should never change.