Ricardo Wurmus <rek...@elephly.net> skribis: > Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.cour...@inria.fr> writes: > >>> Yes I agree. I wonder though: is there a way to know if a specific >>> derivation is a package? >> >> In general no. Of course one could play trick to try and guess whether >> it corresponds to a package, but that should be avoided IMO. > > I wonder if we should work towards specifying a type for derivations. > This could be useful for the user interface to be able to clearly > distinguish grafts from full package builds. > > Currently, there’s no way to tell if the derivations listed under “These > derivations will be built” are expensive package builds or just simple > graft derivations.
Indeed. A simple trick would be to (ab)use the environment variable part of derivations as a property list, the way Nix has traditionally done it (see ‘user+system-env-vars’ in (guix derivations)). So we could have, say, a ‘hint’ environment variable, and the UI would use that to determine if it’s a graft. Thoughts? Ludo’.
