- the module paths a bit weird (I’d find slash or dot separated more obvious)
- some values needed to be constructed with a call to list
- weird dsl for building was mixed in there
- it’s probably not obvious what should be string/symbol/whatever
I’m not sure anything should change though. It still feels a bit weird to me that it’s a program generating the package rather than a more direct ‘just data’ format.
Oh, and how can a package manager avoid dealing with build systems? There are almost as many different build systems as there are packages!
I continue to find it slightly odd that the package definition is not some serialisation of a package object but rather a full program that outputs a package object, and I think this is the root of a bunch of the confusing things about the definition. Consider that the commenter at the top of this thread thought yaml might be preferable. I think that means they didn’t realise they were looking at a program outputting the package definition but rather that they thought they were just looking at the definition itself.
If the whole thing were just data instead of data that’s actually code whose evaluation produces data, I think things would be more obvious. For example, some symbols are just syntax (e.g. in the alist syntax for constructing the package definition) whereas others are references to values of which some are other packages, some are just scheme functions, and some are guix-specific functions. And symbols have other meanings in the build-steps reader macro.
Building package definitions in this way can also make errors harder to pinpoint as the author can write any program they like rather than being restricted to a more limited configuration language. Needing to evaluate programs to get packages can also, I think, make the collection of all packages as a whole pretty opaque and hard to reason about compared to e.g. being able to have a database that contains all the package definitions.
I don’t think the ‘unfamiliar with lisp’ argument is good. I’m pretty familiar with lisp (though not so much guile/scheme) and I’ve been writing it for over ten years and I think this way of specifying packages is not great in the average case, though perhaps there are some complexities that cannot be handled without this general mechanism.
As for error messages, I don’t think that using a real programming language forces the error messages to be bad, or to be too generic. If the error messages are not good it is only because nobody has put in the time and elbow grease to make them good, not because of any fundamental limitation of turing–complete languages.
There's no special syntax for any of those dot slash whatever stuff. (Program item) paths are always lists (like in CSS selectors). Likewise we don't use shell strings and then have to weirdly escape them, we just use an argv list to begin with. And so on. What's the use in pretending it's something it's not?
>- some values needed to be constructed with a call to list
It depends on how good you are with quoting; if you want to avoid quasiquote, "list" is easier to understand. Otherwise, (almost) no values need to be constructed with a call to "list".
(list 1 2 3) is equal to `(1 2 3)
(list 1 2 b) is equal to `(1 2 ,b)
(list 1 'b b) is equal to `(1 b ,b)
If you mean what I think you mean then it's a program running in the build container (in an extra process) (so it's quoted in the scm file of guix).
>- it’s probably not obvious what should be string/symbol/whatever
>I’m not sure anything should change though. It still feels a bit weird to me that it’s a program generating the package rather than a more direct ‘just data’ format.
It will always end up like that, even in packaging systems that start with a "just data" config format. They will always grow their own weird language for #if, #cfg, function calls and so on in the config format. Then they have weird generator scripts generating the config files, and there they are right where we are, just shittier.