Subject: bug#54691: fortune-mod propagates various non-nice things

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2022 19:12:05 +0200

Am Donnerstag, dem 04.08.2022 um 15:37 +0000 schrieb Tobias Geerinckx-
Rice:
> > To me use of ‘deprecated-package’ in this case is just to ensure
> > that users who run ‘guix upgrade’ will transparently get
> > ‘fortune-jkirchartz’.  I don’t have a strong opinion though.
> 
> I believe what Liliana meant is that it's worse to 'transparently'
> upgrade to a data package that doesn't provide the 'fortune' command
> at all (or conversely, an implementation of the command that doesn't
> propagate the actual fortune data), than it is to signal to users
> through an error message that something's up and they need to stop
> and think.
> 
> (Er, that's a lot more words to put in someone's mouth than I
> intended to, sorry :-)
I'm not saying either option is worse than the other, just that we
can't pick both in a manner that provides a functioning package, and
that transparently upgrading to a package that does nothing is a pretty
bad option.  We could transparently upgrade to daikichi, but that'd
just say "no fortunes found" because FORTUNE_PATH will be empty.  Other
options would include a metapackage (also rejected by Maxime) or
providing a dummy fortune-mod package that fails at build with a
helpful message and is disabled in CI (came up as a shower thought).

Cheers