Subject: [bug#63263] [PATCH] gexp: Stop generating unreadable builder scripts.

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 May 2023 23:45:44 +0200

Hello!

Christopher Baines <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

>> How about a linter instead, with the understanding that use of sexps in
>> packages is vanishing?  Perhaps coupled with a ‘guix style’ automatic
>> rewriter.
>
> A linter might be helpful, but I'm not sure it'll help that much.

Yeah.

Another option is ‘guix style -S arguments’:
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63320>.  Not an immediate fix, but a tool
that would let us move away more quickly from a situation that’s prone
to this kind of error.

[...]

> I guess my perspective on this is more from the operation of the guix
> data service, which is carefully computing and storing all of these
> broken derivations (and there's a lot, like 10,000+ per revision at the
> moment, since they change every time you compute them).

Woow, that’s a lot!  Could you send a sample of that list, for one
system type, to get an idea of what’s going on?

Thanks,
Ludo’.