Subject: Re: bug#38100: ‘--with-input’ causes unintended rebuilds

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2020 23:46:22 +0200

Hey there!

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> Indeed, evaluating:
>>
>>   (bag-transitive-inputs
>>    (package->bag ((package-input-rewriting '()) glib)))
>>
>> shows that we have two “python” packages there that are not ‘eq?’.
>
> The problem is that ‘glib’ depends on ‘python-libxml2’, which uses
> ‘python-build-system’ and thus has ‘python’ as an implicit input.
>
> ‘package-input-rewriting’ doesn’t touch implicit inputs so it leaves
> that implicit ‘python’ untouched.
>
> Since ‘transitive-inputs’ (used by ‘bag-transitive-inputs’) uses pointer
> equality, we end up with two “python” packages that are not ‘eq?’ but
> are functionally equivalent: the one produced by
> ‘package-input-rewriting’, and the implicit dependency of
> ‘python-libxml2’.  QED.
>
> (This is essentially the same as <https://bugs.gnu.org/30155>.)

Good news, this is fixed by 2bf6f962b91123b0474c0f7123cd17efe7f09a66,
which introduces package rewriting including implicit inputs!

Before getting there, this issue did get on my nerves for a while.  Here
are several ways to address this issue that I thought of:

  1. Have ‘package-input-rewriting/spec’ traverse implicit inputs, at
     least optionally.  We wouldn’t end up with an
     equivalent-but-not-eq? ‘python’ in the example above.  It does
     change the semantics though, and it may be nice to keep a “shallow”
     replacement option.  That’s what
     2bf6f962b91123b0474c0f7123cd17efe7f09a66 does.

  2. Do (delete-duplicates input-drvs) in ‘bag->derivation’.  That seems
     wise, but it’s unfortunately impossible on ‘master’ because of
     <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/43508>.

  3. ‘package-input-rewriting/spec’ preserves eq?-ness for packages not
     transformed; in the example above, the transformation result would
     be eq? to ‘glib’ because ‘--with-input=libreoffice=inkscape’ had no
     effect.  Tricky to implement efficiently, perhaps not worth it.

I think #2 might still be worth investigating, but it may have
undesirable implications too.  #3 is hardly doable.

All in all, I’m glad that #1 addresses the issue, because it’s also
something we wanted anyway.

Ludo’.