Re: Packaging Jami progress

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Jan <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 19:07:56 +0100
> Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> See https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/38211.
>> 
>
> Cool, thanks for building it! 
> As for the issue, I don't know if the Jami version I use is
> stable, unfortunately some versions from the tarball repo contain bugs.

I don't think it's a Jami bug: as I mentioned the same bug affects the
old package so I believe it comes from us.

> - what about handling the package in a modular way and instead of
>   having three separated packages, can we have one package with many
>   outputs? For example jami:libring, jami:client-gnome,
>   jami:libringclient, etc.

The thing is that those are 3 different build processes, so having 3
packages makes it easier to package.  I believe what we have is the most
natural way to go.

> - support for other operating systems (???) Guix probably doesn't
>   support this now, but we could build every Jami client in a
>   reproducible way.

What do you mean?  Guix can be installed on foreign distribution and
Jami would work there the same way it works on Guix System.

> - easy to use Jami packages with guix pack for other distributions,
>   using different init systems (support for autostart)? Or we can
>   skip this and hope people will install Guix on their systems :)

It's the job of the init system to decide what to start.  The Guix pack
does not embed any init system information, I don't know if it can or
even if that would make sense.

> - Jami daemon (libring) service for the Shepherd? I could do this, but
>   I would have to learn about the Shepherd and daemons, since I know
>   almost nothing.

Wouldn't it be a user service?

> - a small tutorial about maintaining a package, from the perspective of
>   someone, who didn't know much about build systems and packaging.
>   Things like where do you look for the needed dependencies, etc.

I'm not sure there is much more we can do here: regarding the packaging
process, we already have a tutorial (cf. the cookbook) that covers
everything needed to package Jami.  (As tough as Jami may be to package...)

Regarding the dependencies, it belongs to upstream
to tell which deps Jami uses; sadly this is not done very well in
their current documentation.  We could open an issue I suppose.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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