Subject: Re: bug#49169: [PATCH 00/11] Removing input labels from package definitions

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2021 10:47:34 +0200

Hi!

Sarah Morgensen <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I have submitted a patchset [0] which just has the crate importer use
> the same sanitizer as package inputs, which should be good enough until
> we get rid of input labels in the internals.

Excellent, I’ll take a look.

> In the longer term, perhaps we would benefit from some way of indicating
> inputs which are just source? Something like
>
>   (package ... (source-inputs ...))
>
> where the listed packages only provide their source instead of any
> outputs, and only transitively include other packages via source-inputs.
> This would bypass any patching done in phases, but I don't think that's
> common enough in these "source" packages that it would be onerous to use
> origin patches/snippets instead. This would be useful for any build
> system which does not (re)use artifacts from a package's dependencies
> (such as cargo and go).

Yeah, I really don’t know.  I thought we could just as well say that
‘inputs’ means “source inputs” for those packages (and indeed that’s
what happens for Go packages), but I always fail to wrap my head around
the specific needs and constraints of Cargo and Go.

Thanks,
Ludo’.