IRC channel logs

<rekado_>I only looked there because I received an email about this failure

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<rekado>what are your thoughts on making something like this part of the “r-minimal” package in Guix?

<civodul>rekado: i wonder, can it be a standalone package on CRAN?

<civodul>in which case it'd be a standalone package on Guix too

<civodul>and perhaps others could use it via CRAN, which would be fun :-)

<rekado>I thought about this and while it would be cute it would defeat the purpose: to make using R in Guix more convenient out of the box

<rekado>people who use R often also use install.packages (part of R) or devtools (separate package)

<rekado>install.packages generally doesn’t work on a foreign distro, because it uses the system toolchain and libraries

<civodul>the code above doesn't change install.packages though, right?

<rekado>no, it doesn’t, so people still need to know about it.

<rekado>and that means they could also just install it manually

<civodul>what could make a different is if install.packages prints a warning a suggests guix.install maybe?

<civodul>*difference

<rekado>yes, that’s not a bad idea

<rekado>except when … you know this is in an environment where GCC is provided by Guix

<civodul>what do you mean?

<rekado>install.packages works fine when you have a Guix environment with gcc-toolchain and a bunch of libraries

<rekado>i.e. either on Guix System or in a more carefully constructed environment on a foreign distro.

<rekado>telling people to use guix.install then would be a little intrusive, maybe.

<civodul>hmm well, dunno!

<civodul>bundling guix.install in r-minimal is also fine

<civodul>plus, you're talking with someone who doesn't use R, FWIW :-)

<rekado>it just doesn’t feel right to me to modify any of our packages. We’ve been very conservative with regards to functional patches.

<rekado>but I can’t shake the feeling that making package installations from within R “better” would make R users happier with Guix.

<rekado>(the feedback I got from my colleagues seems to suggest that)

<civodul>that's what matters in the end

<civodul>to achieve that, people will need to learn about guix.install one way or another though

2021-06-23.log