Re: How to build GNUTLS Guile bindings on Xubuntu

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Zelphir,

Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@gmail.com> writes:

> I read in the docs at
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Web-Client.html that
> Guile will dynamically make use of GNUTLS for HTTPS requests. However, I
> don't seem to have the bindings installed. There is a link to a guide on
> the same docs page, but the link is dead:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/gnutls-guile/Guile-Preparations.html#Guile-Preparations
> . More searching showed me the following:
>
> There seems to have been some bug which prevented some tests on Debian
> from completing:
>
> Bug discussions seem to indicate the bug was fixed?:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=821457
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=805863
>
> Then there is a commit removing Guile bindings from the gnutls-dev
> package on Debian:
>
> https://salsa.debian.org/gnutls-team/gnutls/commit/ebb7130b47dc08311c1de2c189758a73bbaeca27#58ef006ab62b83b4bec5d81fe5b32c3b4c2d1cc2_35_35

If you look closely, those two bugs were "fixed" by the above commit,
i.e. by simply disabling the Guile bindings in Debian's GnuTLS package.

> Apart from that, I could not find a download link or repository of the
> bindings, like I could for other libraries I so far used in Guile and
> run configure make make install in it. So I do not know how to get the
> bindings for my system, so that my Guile will be able to make requests
> using HTTPS as well as HTTP.

The bindings in question are not a separate package.  They are built and
installed by GnuTLS itself, unless explicitly disabled by passing
"--disable-guile" to the GnuTLS configure script, as Debian now does.

> The bindings seem to be available on GUIX:
>
> https://gitlab.digitalcourage.de/htgoebel/guix/commit/1dbe3a8db0a3e5a8e5f9b30e6f6a6bbfb699275b

Note that the repository above is not the official Guix repository, but
rather someone's personal variant.  Here's the same commit in the
official Guix repository:

  https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=1dbe3a8db0a3e5a8e5f9b30e6f6a6bbfb699275b

> How can I make it work on a Xubuntu 18.04?

Yes, an easy solution would be to install Guix on top of Xubuntu, and
installing the 'guile' and 'gnutls' packages from Guix.  Note that the
binaries from Guix are self-contained and independent of the host
system, in the sense that they are installed in different directories
(within /gnu/store) and don't use any libraries from the host system,
not even the C library.  Guix installs only in /gnu, /var/guix,
/var/log/guix, /etc/guix, ~/.config/guix, and ~/.guix-profile.  You must
set your environment variables to point within ~/.guix-profile, e.g. add
~/.guix-profile/bin to your PATH, to enable the use of software from
Guix.  If you'd like to try it, the instructions are here:

  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html

      Mark