Hi,
On Thu, 07 Jul 2022 at 09:57, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote:
> (Nitpick: it *is* stateless, in the sense that it only depends on Guix
> itself, not on the state of the machine where it is being run.)
I will not argue about what we call state here. :-)
> ‘--export-manifest’ emits a comment (shown above) explaining that the
> manifest is symbolic and that one needs channel info to replicate the
> exact same environment.
I do not understand what you mean by «symbolic» here.
> It is a departure from traditional package managers, and admittedly
> surprising to newcomers. However, my take on this is that we should be
> very upfront about symbolic vs. exact reproducibility. We would muddy
> the waters if we gave version strings the same importance as in other
> tools, when we know that a version string means very little.
I miss about what you disagree because «We would muddy the waters if we
gave version strings the same importance as in other tools, when we know
that a version string means very little.» is the exact root of my
comment.
By returning,
(specifications->manifest
(list "python" "python-numpy"))
or
(specifications->manifest
(list "python@3.8" "python-numpy@1.17"))
depending on the current Guix is just doing that: «muddy the waters».
Instead, I think ’--export-manifest’ should *always* return:
(specifications->manifest
(list "python" "python-numpy"))
without ’@x.y.z’. Other said, be in agreement with the comment:
;; This is "symbolic": it only specifies
;; package names. To reproduce the exact same profile, you also need to
;; capture the channels being used, as returned by "guix describe".
and not sometimes ’package name’ and sometimes ’package name + version’;
as if version string has a special meaning.
To be honest, I do not understand: on one hand, we are advocating that
version string is not enough for reproducibility. On the other hand, we
output version string with a comment «version string is useless, you
need a channel file for replicating».
Since I am missing a point, could you explain more?
Cheers,
simon
