Subject: [bug#41368] [PATCH] Moved gettext to use git to better conform to better bootstrapping, better integration with Software Heritage, and what looks like emerging best practices for package sources.

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 May 2020 14:04:45 -0400

On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 04:30:52PM -0400, Josh Marshall wrote:
> Subject: Moved gettext to use git to better conform to better
> bootstrapping, better integration with Software Heritage, and what looks
> like emerging best practices for package sources.

Based on the previous discussion of this topic [0], I don't think there
was a consensus about whether or not using tarballs or Git sources was
better.

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-05/msg00224.html

> On Sun, May 17, 2020, 15:56 Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > [email-masked] writes:
> AIUI the lack of tarball integration in Software Heritage is temporary,
> > i.e. it will eventually be sorted, and of course back-dated.  So I don't
> > think we need to move everything to git while we wait for that.
> 
> When I looked into it, there appears to have been no progress in a year and
> a half.

Software Heritage is a cool project, but I don't see it as a reason to
start changing our packages yet. For one thing, it hasn't demonstrated
long-term stability in the way that the GNU tarball servers have. And
the apparent lack of progress on this feature (tarball hosting) does not
make me more confident.

There's no reason to avoid SWH, but also no reason to move away from
tarballs where we are already using them. I don't think there is any
danger of losing the gettext source code the way that there is for minor
GitHub projects and scientific computing packages.