Hi, On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 17:13, Leo Prikler <leo.prik...@student.tugraz.at> wrote: > Am Donnerstag, den 31.12.2020, 16:37 +0100 schrieb Rovanion Luckey:
> > > Use git-fetch instead and don't recurse into submodules. You will > > > likely encounter some errors, because it doesn't seem as though > > > nomacs > > > expects you to have its inputs properly packages. *sigh* > > > > Hmm, this one I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind. I think > > I read in some packaging guidelines that url-fetch was preferred if > > possible. > The reason is two-fold: First, it seems to me, that this is a github- > generated tarball, which have been known to be unstable. Second, the > tarball includes a large number of 3rd party sources already packaged > in Guix. Most of them are git submodules, so by using a non-recursive > checkout you can strip them without much effort. > > url-fetch is to be preferred, when there is a sane tarball to fetch. > Most projects only hosted on github don't have that, but certain large- > scale projects (such as GNU itself or GNOME) do host tarballs. It also > enables mirror:// URLS, which translate to a number of hosts, the first > of which to successfully provide a package is chosen. In addition, Git repos are easy to archive on Software Heritage (and fallback); "guix lint -c archival" save the source and then "guix build" fetches from SWH if the upstream has disappeared in the meantime. The story about tarballs is more complicated: the archiving is almost automatic now but the fallback does not work (yet!) even if disarchive [1] is really promising. 1: https://git.ngyro.com/disarchive/tree/README All the best, simon
