’inherit’ and list-dependent (was Re: branch master updated: gnu: emacs: Add TREE_SITTER_GRAMMAR_PATH support.)

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On dim., 12 févr. 2023 at 01:14, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

>> There is an idea to update guix refresh --list-dependent to handle the
>> case with inherited packages as well.  WDYT?
>
> Unfortunately, it’s not possible because inheritance info isn’t
> available at run time.

Well, with the current implementation of ’inherit’, which is just
copy/paste at the record level, indeed it is not possible to detect some
relationship.

However, we could imagine to use ’package/inherit’ or another variant
instead of plain ’inherit’ for creating these inherited packages.  Doing
so, we could collect some information, e.g., in the field ’properties’,
which could be used then by --list-dependent.

Many of us are bitten by this.  I remember a recent update of Git which
also missed the dependency of git-minimal. :-)

For sure, QA helps a lot.  Somehow, braces and belt. ;-)


Cheers,
simon