Subject: Re: bug#60630: [PATCH] guix: channels: Add description field.

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:50:39 +0100

Hi,

"jgart" <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> Right, I agree. What use case did you have in mind, jgart?
>
> See the search that we are building here:
>
> https://toys.whereis.みんな/

Woow, very nice!  We definitely need that kind of tool.

There might be interesting stuff to borrow/share with hpcguix-web, in
particular the bit the periodically updates channels from which packages
are displayed.

> toys is a channel webring in the form of a web API. It currently allows searching for public symbols (parses docstring info if available), services, and packages across the Guix channels that are part of the webring channels.scm file: https://git.sr.ht/~whereiseveryone/toys/tree/master/item/channels.scm
>
> We'd like to be able to have a standardized way to get a channel description in the same way that we have a standardized way to get a description or synopsis of a package.
>
> In other words, we want to make it easy to describe each channel for the users that subscribe to that channel or are browsing channels for stuff that they might want to use.

Right, so I think this could go in <channel-metadata> and
‘read-channel-metadata’, which is what reads ‘.guix-channel’.  To
support i18n, we might want to have a format similar to that of channel
news files.

As additional metadata, we might want to add a link to a logo, to a
substitute server, substitute key, and things like that, as in:

  https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/website/-/blob/master/channels.scm

So I’m closing this one and looking forward to addressing this!

Thanks,
Ludo’.