Subject: [bug#53818] [PATCH 0/3] Add Repology updater

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2022 17:58:14 +0100

Hi Nicolas,

Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Do you have examples where our updaters perform poorly and where
>> Repology does a better job?  I wonder if there are lessons to be drawn
>> and bugs to be fixed.
>
> As a data point, I'm sorry to say that our updaters are useless to me.
>
> I watch over more than one thousand packages. I would have a hard time
> expressing what are those packages to the updater, besides writing and
> keeping up-to-date a huge manifest file. Assuming I could manage this,
> fetching all version information would take considerable time, and,
> since many packages are from GitHub, the party would stop early anyway
> with GitHub refusing to proceed and requesting some token I don't have.
>
> OTOH, using Repology API, I get the information I want in about ten
> seconds. Sure, I need to eyeball through the results, filtering false
> positives (around 4% in my case), but it still is a practical solution.

(I’m confused because my understanding of what you first wrote was that
Repology had too many false positives to be useful.)

You wrote about your feelings and that’s insightful, but can we focus on
specific examples where updaters are not helpful so we can better
understand and improve the situation?

> IMO, to be useful, updaters may need to rely on an external service,
> which may, or may not, belong to the Guix ecosystem.

All the updaters rely on an external service.  Relying on a centralized
SaaSS is different, though.

> They also need a good UI.

Do you have examples of what’s wrong on the UI side?

To me, the main shortcoming is that ‘guix refresh’ doesn’t tell you that
if you update X, you may also need to update Y and Z.  That info is not
always available, but it is available in repos such as PyPI and ELPA.

Thanks,
Ludo’.