Subject: Bug in guix manual: "Submitting Packages" doesn't advise to check for inheritance

From: "nomike (they/them)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 03:05:17 +0200

Hi!

I've recently submitted a patch for openscad which was approved and 
merged into guix.
Unfortunately, this broke the package =emacs-scad-mode=, a fact I didn't 
know back then.

It's quite simple to fix: The upstream project just cut out their emacs 
major mode, so instead of inheriting from =openscad=, =emacs-scad-mode= 
should be a separate package, and I'm already working on this.

The issue this brings up though is, that the manual doesn't talk about 
this at all in the "Submitting Packages" section, and thus I completely 
missed that.

I also don't know how to properly test for this. There doesn't seem to 
be an equivalent to `guix refresh --list-dependents foo` for listing 
packages inheriting a certain one. The best I could come up with was 
=grep -r '(inherit openscad'= for now, but that seems far from optimal.

So IMHO we first need to come up with a decent method of searching for 
packages directly or indirectly inheriting another one. And secondly we 
need to document this in the manual.

Any thoughts on that?

Regards

nomike