Re: Guix-based build tool

[julien lepiller]

Le 2018-04-09 17:30, address@hidden a écrit :
> Hello!
>
> Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:
>
> > Indeed, I love working with Guix and developing with Guix. Guix takes
> > care of my deployment and configuration requirements.
> >
> > I have written some time in the past that with Guix you don't need
> > autotools. The main thing autotools solve is configuring the build for
> > an environment. At the same time, with Guix you get a predictable
> > environment, so a make file (or similar) suffices. It is what I do in
> > all my development projects - I don't use autotools to develop and
> > deploy them. It greatly simplifies my existence :). Indeed, I have
> > never liked autotools (essentially a nasty hack) and only used them
> > before Nix/Guix. So, my approach is the same as yours :)
>
> +1!
>
> If we could provide tooling with an abstraction level close to that of 
> a
> makefile, that’d help a lot.

I don't really agree mixing a package manager and a build tool is a
good idea. Sure, it helps a lot because they both solve the same kind
of problem and I certainly see what advantage it would have, but so do
maven devs. They mixed a package manager and a build system together.
It became the official way to build many packages, including its own
dependencies. As a result, it became a total mess to build maven from
scratch. So if someone wants to build a package whose only build
system is guix but can't use guix for some reason (maybe it wasn't
ported to their platform?) will just cry and hate us.

> Actually, just like we have ‘emacs-build-system’, we could very much 
> add
> ‘guile-build-system’ for simple Guile packages that don’t need/use
> Autoconf & co.

That's more reasonable though :)

> ‘guile-build-system’ would automatically run ‘guild compile’,
> ‘makeinfo’, etc. pretty much like we do here:
>
>   
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/guile.scm#n870
>
> Once we have that, developers of Guile packages can simply drop a
> ‘.guix’ file in their project and use it with ‘guix environment’, ‘guix
> build’, and ‘guix package’.
>
> That’s coarser-grain than a makefile, of course, but would be a good
> first step to providing tooling for people working on Guile code.
>
> Any takers for ‘guile-build-system’?
>
>
> A next step could be to add a tool that understands a syntax like that
> of the guildhall, which gets us closer to the makefile/Makefile.am 
> level
> of abstraction:
>
>   https://github.com/ijp/guildhall/blob/master/docs/packaging.texi#L121
>
> Ludo’.