Hi Mark, On Mon, Mar 31 2025, Mark L. wrote:
> I like it so far Me, too! > It seems that package dependencies specified in the languages > lockfiles need to be duplicated into the guix package definitions, > which I think means any dependency of the project needs to be packaged > in Guix, & any package updates need to be done twice. Is this correct? That question is more or less unresolved in Guix, both technically and philosophically. One the side there are folks who say that language-specific prerequisites should be curated and the maintainer-specified versions overridden. Proponents usually point to the volunteer nature of many upstream projects, which can be severely out of date. > Would it be possible for the build system to somehow infer packages > from the project dependencies - maybe have them supply a function to > return package definitions as sourced from the lockfile? Fans of the other side---I am among them, although potentially alone---argue that maintainers know best which versions their projects require. It usually leads to many versions being packaged (there is no way around packaging prerequisites before building a consuming package, as Tomas noted) but most are source trees that do not take a lot of time or effort to tar up. Either way, Guix provides a great way to import upstream prerequisites via a the 'guix import' family of commands. Their function an quality differ a lot by language family but they are a great base from which to work. You may be interested in contributing in that area. Thank you for using GNU Guix! Kind regards Felix
