[bug#33801] import: github: Support source URIs that redirect to GitHub

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Arun Isaac <address@hidden> skribis:

>> Do you know how many packages fall into that category?
>
> With this patch, we have a problem estimating the coverage using `guix
> refresh -L'. Now, to estimate coverage, we need to make HTTP requests
> for every single source tarball in Guix to determine if it redirects to
> GitHub. This is an enormous number of HTTP requests! When I ran `guix
> refresh -L', it took a very long time to finish coverage estimation. So,
> I cancelled the command. Any better way to handle this?

Ouch, that’s a problem indeed.  We could maintain a cache of redirects,
although that wouldn’t be a real solution.

Hmm, now that I think about it, shouldn’t we store the github.com URL
directly for these packages?  We could add a new lint check along the
lines of the ‘check-mirror-url’ procedure that would allow us to find
out which URLs need to be changed.  If we took that route, the changes
you made to the importer would no longer be necessary.  :-/

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.