Re: Trouble with circular module dependencies (Re: 01/02: gnu: Add ncurses-with-gpm.)

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Ricardo Wurmus writes:

> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> FWIW, I would like to see us work to eliminate all cyclic module
>>> dependencies in Guix, by splitting up our package modules as needed so
>>> that they form a directed acyclic graph.
>>
>> This seems hard to achieve, unless we use one file per package.
>
> Are there drawbacks to using one file per package other than it’s a bit
> “heavy” due to all the boilerplate of license headers and module
> definitions?

I have two thoughts that are related to this:
- languages like Perl, which have tons of modules on CPAN, a great
  number of which are incredibly simple and small: we are literally
  talking about adding 100s of files. This is quite different from
  adding a "program", such as Emacs, a larger, well-defined definition.
  I don't think the Perl example is a stopper, but perhaps something to
  consider in terms of performance/implementation.

- If we take this direction, perhaps we should aim to have a helper
  commandline script to which you can pass the dependencies, and which
  takes care of writing the boilerplate as well as importing the
  appropriate modules?

Alex