Re: Proposal: Prefix language-name for language library packages

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 06:31:24PM +0000, alírio eyng wrote:
>>> Ludovic Courtès:
>>> >what about multiple-language packages?  I’m thinking of
>>> >‘c+guile-guile’ and ‘c+siod+python-gimp’.
>>> the ideal categorization would be one output for each interface.
>>> so "guile" (scheme), "guile:c", "gimp" (gui), "gimp:c", "gimp:siod",
>>> "gimp:python", "emacs" (gui), "emacs:tui", "emacs:elisp" (to run
>>> "emacs -batch -eval").
>>> e.g. guile:c and emacs:tui are pretty useless for me, so i could not
>>> install them.
>>> it's worth to focus on packages already split: "emacs" (gui+tui+elisp)
>>> and "emacs:no-gui" (tui+elisp), linux-libre, ...
>>
>> I don't think we should split packages up unless there is a pressing
>> reason to do it. For example, some our packages have a rarely-used
>> component that uses a lot of disk space or has a very large dependency.
>> It makes sense to put those in different outputs.
>>
>> But if we go too far, nobody will be able to tell which package to
>> install to accomplish their task.
>
> I agree.  I’d like to only split up packages when the effort is
> justified.

Agreed.

FWIW, until recently Nixpkgs didn’t use multiple outputs much (info
"(guix) Packages with Multiple Outputs").  Lately they merged a change
to use them very aggressively.  So for instance, GNU libidn, which takes
800 KiB in total, has no less than 5 outputs:

  
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/libraries/libidn/default.nix

I think this is going a bit too far.  :-)

I think the approach should be to profile packages with ‘guix size’ and
to act mostly on a case-by-case basis.

Ludo’.