Re: Looking to contribute

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Here's an update :)

>> Installer:
>> - Currently, the installer invokes the parted executable for partitioning 
>> which is quite jarring (it looks very different).  It would be nice if it 
>> just used the parted library.

>>But there's no good guile-parted yet.  I've started hacking on one and it's 
>>starting to look OK but it's not done.  If you are interested in that I can 
>>upload it somewhere (github, gitlab etc).

>I would be happy to work on this.

guile-gcc-unit is 80% done now (it also works on the real parted headers by 
now).  See <https://github.com/daym/guile-gcc-unit>.  (I think I'll not use 
records after all and just keep the result as huge trees that you can (ice-9 
match) on).

What it allows you is to:
- invoke gcc (with a special option) on a tiny source file which only 
"#include"s stuff and then
- feed the output to guile-gcc-unit and then
- get out a Scheme list of all the C prototypes, records, enums etc that are 
available.

The next step would be to map the generated declaration tree (output of 
main.scm) to the wrapper forms I posted - to have actual callable parted 
procedures.

> - No mouse support yet.

Now the installer does have mouse support :)

Updated installer dev usage (branch "wip-installer-2" on 
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git>):

$ ./pre-inst-env guix environment guix --fallback --pure --ad-hoc guile-ncurses 
kbd pciutils util-linux wireless-tools
[env]$ ./pre-inst-env guix system installer
... press Ctrl-z when you are fed up with it :)

Be careful that it doesn't nuke your system (it does ask before formatting or 
installing anything - so it's not that bad).

Also, don't run it as root...

> - We have ISO9660 CD support code so it would be quite easy to make it so 
> that the image file for the graphical installer (see link above) also worked 
> if you burned it to a CD.  See threads mentioning "grub-mkrescue" on the 
> mainling list.

95% done.  If would actually work if we came to a consensus about the volume 
label (it must be uppercase; see bug# 27520 in guix-patches).  Also, UUID boot 
support is still mostly missing - same as in the non-iso9660 case.

> Bootloader:
> - The bootloader support code doesn't support booting Windows systems etcetc.

Started to provide scaffolding on this - let's see what we decide about using 
<menu-entry> (see bug# 27529 in guix-patches).  I don't really have a use for 
it so I won't go much further than providing the scaffolding.

> - There's no u-boot installer yet.  (There's support for using existing 
> u-boot but it doesn't install the u-boot bootloader itself yet.  That's 
> because doing that safely is very difficult)

Depends on the parted bindings.

> Packages:
> - The GUI hooks for desktop files and mime types suck.  Usually, the desktop 
> file database is updated much too late (mostly by accident).  I've looked 
> into fixing it but it would entail rebuilding almost all the graphical 
> packages we have - and I think KDE would still not do it correctly.

宋文武 fixed it :)