Re: guile-hall issues converting my project to a hall project

[Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com>]

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Hi Zelphir and Tim,

I am the author of guile hall — apologies for only now getting into this
thread. I'm afraid I have been somewhat distracted with other things.

First of all I want to echo what others have said — thank you very much
for your detailed descriptions of what exactly happened when you tried
to migrate the project to guile hall.

The aim of the project is to massively reduce the barrier of entry to
creating new, portable, high quality guile projects — and to contribute
them to Guix. Your descriptions suggest it's not there yet!

In any case, some comments inline:

Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> writes:

> Hello Tim!
>
> Thank you, it works now!
>
> Removing the duplicate entry of `fslib` in hall.scm fixed it.

Fwiw, since commit ac76541a this issue can be automatically resolved by
running scan once more: it should remove duplicate entries in hall.scm.

> Regarding the license: OK, I have no problem moving my license to
> `COPYING`. However, I still think, that it should not put GPL there,
> when I specified AGPL in `hall.scm`. This looks like a hardcoded
> fallback, which does not take the license specification into account.
> Something like: "If there is no `COPYING` file just put GPL into a file
> `COPYING`." instead of "If there is no `COPYING` file just put
> <user-specified-license-in-hall.scm> into a file `COPYING`.". I could be
> wrong though, as I do not know anything about guile-hall's internals.

This is odd — Hall should respect your license choice. It should, for
(A)GPL licenses automatically download those from the internet and
install them in COPYING. There was an issue with those licenses hiding
behind a 302 status code, which resulted in fallback text being loaded
in COPYING. But even that fallback text should respect your license.

I just tried changing my license to AGPLv3+ in one of my projects,
running hall from Master (the most recent commit fixes the 302 license
issue), and it's fetching the license correctly.

I'd be interested in seeing what your experience is if you are willing
to try?

In any case, Hall is undergoing active development, and I'm hoping to
have a fresh release end of this month, with a whole bunch of
improvements and bug fixes. Definitely feel free to drop issues to me
directly by email or on gitlab (though some of the ones you raised have
been fixed, like the unknown filetype issue).

Best wishes,

Alex

> Follow up question would be, how to bring the package into the guix
> repository, but I am guessing, that it will be answered at
> https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Direct-checkout-hacking.html,
> which I have not read yet.
>
> Another question is, whether I should put you into the authors file and
> write something like "help with packaging" there. What is the common
> practice?
>
> Best regards,
> Zelphir
>
> On 2/16/21 5:48 PM, Tim Van den Langenbergh wrote:
>> Err, looking at your hall.scm file, you have the fslib file added to your
>> libraries twice.
>>
>> Guix environment is not needed if you have all the requirements for building
>> the package installed locally, but if you want to distribute your package it's
>> good practise to ensure it builds in a clean environment (see also https://
>> guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-environment.html for more
>> information about Guix environments).
>>
>> The "COPYING" file is hardcoded as license file in Hall, to ensure compatibility
>> with GNU standards: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>>
>> Vale
>>
>> -Tim
>>
>>


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