Re: How to get the package metadata as structured data?

[David Craven]

Hi Philippe,

Thank you for your interest in guix =)

All package metadata can be accessed easily through scheme. There is
no way to export this data currently, although it probably wouldn't be
too hard to implement.

The approach I was planning on taking is the following:
Take a package, remove all build-phases except unpack, add a phase to
run scancode and add the output json to the store.

This way guix already takes care of fetching and unpacking the package
and caching the result. Unless a build input changes, for example
scancode (an input to the scancode phase) is updated, or a scanned
package is updated, running a tool that I'll call `guix license` for
now will work of the json file that was already generated. This means
that improving the reporting or postprocessing the results doesn't
require rescanning a dependency.

Maybe someone else has other/better ;-) thoughts on this?

Cheers
David