[bug#74987] [PATCH 0/2] Some dependencies for julia-setfield

[King, Spencer]

Hi Ludo, 

Thank you for being so prompt when it comes to reviewing my patches, I really 
do appreciate it. I'm happy to help the Julia package set grow. All of my Julia 
contributions so far have been working towards packaging some of the larger 
machine learning packages that I use, which have pretty deep dependency trees.

I agree that longer-term maintenance is a point of concern. Perhaps that will 
change if Julia begins to see more widespread adoption. I think one of the 
biggest issues facing Julia packaging is that there currently isn't the same 
level of interest as languages like Python. I also know that there have been 
some issues with packages not building reproducibly due to upstream issues with 
the internals of the Julia compiler, but I'm not going to pretend I have an 
in-depth understanding of that issue.

I have seen your thread about your efforts to package a new version of Julia. 
It looks pretty complex and is definitely a major step up in complexity from 
any packages I've written so far. I think this comes back to the issue of 
interest, Julia just doesn't have the same level of interest as other languages 
in scientific computing so it can be challenging to find collaborators.

Like you said, individual package upgrades have gone fine so far. I've done a 
few myself without issues. I agree that it probably won't last as the package 
set grows and we end up with more complex dependency trees. However, I imagine 
that is a similar issue faced by other package sets in Guix.

Best,
Spencer