Subject: Re: [bug#45000] [PATCH 0/9] Build git-annex with assistant webapp enabled

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:52:10 -0500

Hi Jonathan,

Kyle Meyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> zimoun writes:
>
>> The git-annex package is growing and now start to fetch bunch of
>> dependencies.  Well, I do not necessary want to have all that when I
>> only use the CLI part of git-annex.
>>
>> Does it make sense to have 2 variants: git-annex (minimal) and
>> git-annex-assistant (full features)?
>
> While I'm happy to see this series (thanks, Jonathan!), I share the same
> feeling as a git-annex user that doesn't use the assistant (and my
> impression is that a substantial proportion of git-annex users rely on
> only the command-line interface).

As an occasional git-annex user, I agree.  My preference is for
“git-annex” to be the full experience and to make a “-minimal” package
that omits the assistant.  I guess we could also use multiple outputs,
but that would likely be difficult to pull off (not to mention the fact
that it doesn’t do anything to simplify the build-time dependency
graph).

That being said, I could easily make that change on top of this series.

With respect to the patches, I managed to apply them all, build all of
the packages, and run the assistant, so that’s good!  However, most of
the packages are more recent then the versions given in the Stackage LTS
Haskell 14.27 list <https://www.stackage.org/lts-14.27>, which we follow
to maintain a consistent package set.  Please see
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-patches/2020-12/msg00086.html>
for an explanation.  (The short version is that the problem is not
really your fault but rather the fault of our tools suggesting at every
turn to do the wrong thing.)  All of the packages except ghc-hjsmin and
ghc-cryptonite-conduit are too recent.

Would you mind sending an updated patch set with the LTS Haskell 14.27
versions?  As of recently, if you run “guix lint” on Haskell packages it
will warn you if the version is wrong and suggest the correct version.

Besides that, there are a few minor issues in the descriptions.  Mostly
incomplete sentences.  It’s not a big deal as they are easy enough to
fix at commit time.  However, if you are going to update the patches
anyway...  :)

Thanks!

-- Tim