Subject: Re: [PATCH] gnu: Syncthing: Update to 1.28.1.

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:41:45 -0500

On Mon, Dec 16, 2024 at 09:44:33PM +0000, Sharlatan Hellseher wrote:
> I've notice syncthing was build from source without vendor that swap
> back to the release tarball containing bundled vendor.

Yes, we made that change a while ago.

For me, I decided that I didn't think that "unbundling" the dependencies
was a good use of my time so I stopped doing it.

> Would it be reasonable to built it completely relaying on the packages
> available in Guix, WDYT?

Personally, I don't think it's reasonable.

The GPL says that source code must be available in "the preferred form
of the work for making modifications to it."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

Syncthing is not GPL, but I think that requirement is a good guideline
for us to follow so that Guix can give the benefits of GNU and the GPL
to our users.

For Go software, the preffered from for editing is a Git tree with
bundled / vendored dependencies at specific Git commits. Not a bunch of
separate trees that the user would have to laboriously re-assemble.

However, if we must unbundle, we could consider creating a new Guix
mechanism to ease the maintenance burden of Go packages: package
variants with parameterized versions.

For example, you have a main package variant of some Go module, call it
go-foo. That looks like a normal Guix package. If a package needs to use
go-foo, it would look like this:

(inputs
 (list (go-foo
         "1.0.0"
	 "cabba6edr1x2231hw0zsxm53sw34wxcs4ijjjcnzcg1vz9drjrg9")))

At least that would be easy for package maintenance.

But I think that using the bundled dependencies for Go packages is the
right thing to do from a GNU perspective. Of course we have to make sure
they are all free software.