bug#27271: [PATCH 0/4] Catch collisions at profile creation time

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Ludo,

> These patches allow us to catch problematic collisions when computing
> a profile derivation.  As we know, the profile builder often spits out
> a number of warnings about collisions but that is not very useful because
> users cannot distinguish the problematic cases from the harmless cases
> (an example of a harmless case is when GDB and Binutils provide an
> almost-identical .info file twice).

This is very good!  Thanks for implementing it!

> An open question is whether there are commonly used combinations of
> packages that trigger conflicts.  I haven’t had any problems with my
> profile (with 234 packages) nor with my GuixSD config, but I encourage
> you to test it on your profile!

We often see this at the MDC because some people don’t use manifests and
I may have upgraded the shared Guix instance between invocations of
“guix package”.  This happens particularly often with numpy because
that’s propagated quite often.  (I’d *love* to get rid of propagated
inputs in Python!  They are so annoying!)

> Thoughts?

I’ll give this a try soon and report my experience with it.
Thanks again!

-- 
Ricardo

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