Subject: Re: [bug#28251] [PATCH 0/3] Add generic JSON importer

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2017 17:35:46 +0200

Hi Ricardo!

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:

> this patch set adds a somewhat unusual importer.  Assume we have a file
> "package.json" with the following contents:
>
> {
>   "name": "hello",
>   "version": "2.10",
>   "source": {
>     "method": "url-fetch",
>     "uri": "mirror://gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz",
>     "sha256": {
>       "base32": "0ssi1wpaf7plaswqqjwigppsg5fyh99vdlb9kzl7c9lng89ndq1i"
>     }
>   }
>   "build-system": "gnu",
>   "home-page": "https://www.gnu.org/software/hello/",
>   "synopsis": "Hello, GNU world: An example GNU package",
>   "description": "It really works.",
>   "license": "GPL-3.0+",
>   "inputs": ["r-minimal@3", "ghc-pandoc", "samtools@0"]
> }

Neat!

I wonder if we could further simplify the “source” part, like allowing
(maybe optionally) for:

  "source": "mirror://gnu…"

and then letting the importer download the thing and fill in the hash.
Likewise for a Git checkout:

  "git": { "commit": "cabba9e"; "url": "…" };

Thoughts?

> What do you think?  Terrible?  Exciting?  Both? *raises hand*

Both!  :-)

As discussed at the GHM, I don’t fully measure that, but it can probably
help us reach out to more people.

Thanks!

Ludo’, who goes look at the patches.