In the code there, the function propagate-packages will indeed try and
propagate every package through the graph node.
I looked at your code, it's comprehensive. I wasn't sure such a thing
was possible with input rewriting, although I think there's still a lot
of benefit to the functional approach, like this:
- some packages are present under different names (emacs has
emacs-minimal, emacs, emacs-pgtk, emacs-wide-int...) and that is not
handled by this function.
It should handle it pretty elegantly, since those packages inherit from
emacs, if you replace emacs they'll inherit from your replacement while
keeping their unique traits.
- propagating some packages that are used in build-systems will trigger
massive rebuilds (e.g. go, emacs, python, ocaml, texlive), you'll
probably have to be smart about what you want to avoid to propagate, but
it's great because guix can already hide a package to
package-inputs-rewriting using (hidden-package {package-name}). There are some
examples in the series.
No idea how, but I guess I should implement a #:mask-hidden? argument
to handle this. I have more basic issues for now, but that's a good
point.
- this has a cost. I haven't timed it yet, but the slowdown is
noticeable, though still quite usable.
I'm doing a couple stupid things, it's improved with the last few
commits, but there's still a long way to go. If there's a cost to
syntax rule abuse, you were probably feeling that.
- you of course have to get the packages into the function from a
profile. Here's it's done in RDE's code, but that should be quite
doable in Guix too.
Yeah, the implementation model is kinda strange. Having to put extra
code in every single module in the entire repo isn't a great
prerequisite for anything. It could be the point that prevents this
from manifesting. The mile long butt-ugly list of inputs that it needs
doesn't help.
Thanks for the tips. Work is still ongoing, but recursive propagation
now works when giving one package-set another as an input, so the
intended use-case is now possible.
- sc
