Re: Debugging Guix packages?

[Jookia <166291@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 11:26:14PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Yes, I agree that this would be nice.

I wonder how this could be implemented, any ideas?

> OTOH, for things like GCC, once you start fiddling with the build tree,
> you quickly lose track of what state you’re in.
>
> My workflow has been:
>
>   guix build foo -K
>   # build fails
>   cd /tmp/guix-build*
>   source environment-variables
>   # Fiddle with the build tree to get additional info about the problem
>   # and a possible fix.
>   # Write a phase that hopefully fixes the issue.
>   # Try again.
>
> Since the ‘environment-variables’ file always contains the value of
> environment variables at the time where the build failed (rather than
> their initial value), it usually works quite well.

This could be good enough for now but again this doesn't work with this like
builds that don't fail. My concrete example is wanting to patch software but not
knowing how to get to the pre-patch state so I can then work from that in
testing which patches apply and which don't, or make my own.

> My 2¢,
> Ludo’.

Cheers,
Jookia.