Re: Fixing package-with-python2

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Mon, Feb 01, 2016 at 08:49:10AM -0500, Thompson, David wrote:
>> Here's a potential solution for 'package-with-python2': module
>> introspection.  AIUI, the issue is that some Python 2 packages need
>> extra manual tweaking, but 'package-with-python2' creates package
>> variants without these tweaks. Our algorithm could look up
>> 'python2-foo' in (gnu packages python) and use that package object, if
>> it exists.  This would stop the recursive transformation for that
>> branch of the dependency graph and allow us to tweak Python 2 variants
>> as needed without fear.
>
> I suggested the same off-line: Rewrite the variable name and use that.
> But I was told it could not be done in Guile, so I am happy to stand
> corrected.

It’s not that it cannot be done, but rather that this is an R-style hack
we’d rather avoid.  :-)

The reason is that objects live independently of variables, variables
can have any names etc.  Having computation results depend on how things
are named would make things non-deterministic and hard to reason about.

Ludo’.