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

From: Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2022 19:42:13 +0100

Hello,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

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

Repology is okay for my use-case because I've gotten accustomed to its
quirks. I wouldn't recommend it as a fall-back solution for Guix in its
current form, tho, for the reason above. Does that make sense?

> 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?

I wrote about the following facts:
- it is difficult to specify a large number of packages,
- when you have specified a large number of packages, the processing is
  slow,
- checking GitHub fails for me.

I don't see any feelings in there.

>> 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.

Fair enough. I meant an external centralized service.

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

It has no Emacs interface. Nuff said. ;)

Again, I don't know how to specify efficiently many packages, e.g., all
Emacs packages, or all games. Also, reading through a massive output in
the terminal is not very user friendly, IMO.

> 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.

I don't think solving this is realistic. Dependencies are sometimes very
loose.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou