Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.cour...@inria.fr> writes:
> 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. This sounds like a good trick to me. I think it would be great to give more hints to the UI and make it clearer to users what work they can expect Guix to perform. -- Ricardo
