On 2019-01-05 18:43, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > Efraim Flashner <efr...@flashner.co.il> skribis: > >> On Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 04:05:11PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote: >>> Hello! >>> >>> guix-comm...@gnu.org skribis: >>> >>> > efraim pushed a commit to branch master >>> > in repository guix. >>> > >>> > commit c39491829a0c1d870f8133b8f7a699152fc71503 >>> > Author: Efraim Flashner <efr...@flashner.co.il> >>> > Date: Wed Dec 19 22:08:18 2018 +0200 >>> > >>> > scripts: refresh: Allow searching recursively. >>> > >>> > * guix/scripts/refresh.scm (refresh-recursive, list-transitive): New >>> > procedures. >>> > (show-help): Document it. >>> > (guix-refresh): Add flags and checks for new options. >>> > * doc/guix.texi (Invoking guix refresh): Document new options. >>> >>> Nice work! >>> >>> > +@item --list-transitive >>> > +List all the packages which one or more packages depend upon. >>> >>> What about ‘--list-dependencies’, for clarity and symmetry with >>> ‘--list-dependents’? >>> >> >> It was originally '--list-recursive' but Bavier suggested >> '--list-transitive' so it would match 'guix build --sources=transitive' >> >> If it's too close to '--list-dependents' then I'm worried people could >> look at it and ask 'packages FOO is dependent on or packages that are >> dependent on FOO?' > > Good point. I do feel like ‘--list-dependencies’ is clearer though. > With ‘list-transitive’, since “transitive” is an adjective, I first > wondered: transitive what? > > What do people think?
I pondered this a bit. What about evolving our terminology as if we talk about the graph produced by "guix graph"? That means we have only 2 directions. Upwards: 'packages that are dependent on FOO' Downwards: 'packages FOO is dependent on' This could give us the following terms: X is an upwards dependency to Y. FOO is a downward dependency of BAR. => --list-upwards-dependencies --list-downwards-dependencies Furthermore we could create words to describe packages with many/few dependencies: Package X is a heavy root with 120 upward links. We could define a scale and make our commands output it consistently: - light root <=50 upward links - medium root >50<=100 upward links - heavy root >100<=500 upward links - very heavy root >500<=1000 upward links - extremely heavy root >1000 upward links (The numbers above are just an example) With npm-packages we could say: Package X is a heavy root with 3 versions in use. Package Y is a light root with only the latest in use. (In npm a package can appear multiple times as dependency to dependencies and sometimes in different versions meaning we have to package it multiple versions of some packages.) Thoughts? -- Cheers Swedebugia
