Re: [gwl-devel] [Bug?] Cannot use Guix Workflow Language on Guix System

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Florian,

thanks for your message!

> I hope this is the right mailing list.

It is!

> (the website appears to be down)

Oh, it crashed… I fixed the bug causing the crash and the site is up
again.

> How can I use the Guix Workflow Language on Guix System?  I tried
> `guix package -i gwl` as described on
> <https://www.guixwl.org/getting-started>

The version of the gwl that’s currently available in Guix is pretty old
and I’ve been meaning to make a new release as soon as I get around to
fixing an annoying bug (in “load-workflow”).

> but the guix process and guix workflow commands do not become
> available.

Hmm.  I’m only ever using it from a git checkout with “./pre-inst-env
guix workflow” and that works just fine.  The behaviour you describe
sounds like a bug, though.

FWIW “guix process” no longer exists in the latest version, and
“GUIX_WORKFLOW_PATH” has been removed — workflows are now executed
directly from files and are no longer arranged in Guile modules.

The relationship to Guix as an extension is … difficult.  I’m evaluating
a few changes for the future, such as whether it would make sense to use
“guix repl” instead of directly extending Guix.

> On Debian I had written a Guix workflow to deploy a not-yet-public
> Haunt website to a shared hosting provider and tried to use it on Guix
> now.  (I hope that is a legitimate use case; I used gwl because I can
> specify package inputs.)

Interesting.  While the primary audience is HPC users with scientific
workflows where parallel execution of processes on a cluster is
desirable, I guess building a website automatically with GWL processes
would work fine.  Personally, I’d probably directly use a Guix build
script because this workflow does not seem to benefit much from parallel
execution.

--
Ricardo