Subject: Re: [bug#34807] [PATCH 1/2] Add (guix lzlib).

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 May 2019 23:09:40 +0200

Hello!

Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Right on time, I just finished it!
>
> - I've been in touch with Antonio, Lzip's maintainer, for more than a
>   week and now I'm confident that I have a decent understanding of the
>   library.
>
> - Your m4 suggestion didn't work.  I've included a comment.  We need to
>   fix it before merging.  I'm not the right person for this job I'm
>   afraid :p  Ludo?

Sure, I can do it.

> - The convenience functions do not support multi-member archives.
>   Multi-member archives are mostly useful for parallelization, but we
>   don't use that in Guix, so it's OK.  Should it be required some day,
>   we would need to implement it, which requires a little bit more work.
>   I've documented all that.
>
> - The implementation of lzread! is subpar because I understood a
>   subtlety a bit too late.  But that's alright, it does not affect
>   performance nor reliability.
>
> - I've included 11 tests covering all your suggestions.
>
> - I haven't strace'd the Guile process.  The code regarding ports is
>   identical to zlib.scm, so it's unlikely there would be an issue in
>   this area.  I have never done this before, so out of curiosity, how do
>   you run a specific Guix tests without going through `make'?
>
> Next steps? :D

This looks all good to me!

I was about to apply it and add the Autoconf machinery, but I thought we
could also make it a separate project that could be beneficial to other
Guilers out there (like we did with Guile-Gcrypt and Guile-Git).
Incidentally that would also avoid the need for adding the ‘%liblz’
variable in (guix config), which simplifies things a bit.

WDYT?

If you want to take that route, I’m happy to help with the Autotools
machinery (or you could use ‘hall’ from the ‘guile-hall’ package to do
that for you.)

If you don’t feel like taking that route (or at least not yet ;-)),
that’s OK for me too, I don’t feel strongly either way.

Thoughts?

Thank you!

Ludo’.