Re: Building things other than Guix with Cuirass

[ng0 <ng0@infotropique.org>]

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Christopher Baines transcribed 3.8K bytes:
> Hey,
> 
> At the GHM, one of the things I looked in to was cuirass. Specifically,
> I tried to see if I could build a collection of guix packages that sit
> outside of Guix.

I would be very much interested in exploring the possibility
(at the very least testing/experimenting with) to use cuirass to build
the "gnunet" and "gnunet-doc" guix definitions which reside inside the
gnunet repository (and more to come, in other GNUnet related repos
with the perspective on integrating it into our (GNUnet) infrastructure
once cuirass proves to be mature enough. Ultimately to evaluate if (or
when) it could replace buildbot (and if not, what needs to be improved
in cuirass to get to the point where it could replace it).

That is my "ideas for cuirass" (you can ask me to split up this horrible
long sentence if it's a problem.)

> From trying to use cuirass for a few hours, I began thinking that it
> might be beneficial to change the interface between cuirass and the
> jobs.
> 
> The interface provided by cuirass to fetch jobs through consists of
> specifying a Guile load path, file, procedure, and arguments to that
> procedure.
> 
> Currently, something like this is used to describe how to get some
> jobs.
> 
>   `((#:name . "hello")
>     (#:url . "git://git.savannah.gnu.org/guix.git")
>     (#:branch . "master")
>     (#:no-compile? . #t)
>     (#:load-path . ".")
>     (#:proc . cuirass-jobs)
>     (#:file . "/tmp/drv-file.scm")
>     (#:arguments (subset . "hello")))
> 
> As an example, with minor changes to the way arguments are handled, I
> think this could also be represented as a invocation of guile.
> 
>   `((#:name . "hello")
>     (#:url . "git://git.savannah.gnu.org/guix.git")
>     (#:branch . "master")
>     (#:no-compile? . #t)
>     (#:command "guile -L. -s /tmp/drv-file.scm -e cuirass-jobs -- --subset=hello"))
> 
> However, if you've gone to the trouble to have a Guile program, it
> might be easier to make it executable directly.
> 
>   `((#:name . "hello")
>     (#:url . "git://git.savannah.gnu.org/guix.git")
>     (#:branch . "master")
>     (#:no-compile? . #t)
>     (#:command "/tmp/drv-file.scm --subset=hello"))
> 
> It might also be possible to remove the hardcoded compilation process
> and just use the single command. However, it might be better to be able
> to specify a separate compilation command or list of commands.
> 
> Back to the jobs though, Cuirass already executes a separate command to
> load jobs, but this is hardcoded to the evaluate command. I think
> changing the interface to allow directly specifying a command would
> open up new possibilities for cuirass, and at the same time simplify
> the implementation and interface.
> 
> I've tried out using this approach for building a collection of guix
> packages that sit outside of guix, and it seems to work well. I copied
> one of the examples, and wrote a guile program that when run prints out
> the jobs. Cuirass then runs a bash script that sets up the correct
> environment with the guix environment command, and then invokes the
> guile script to generate the jobs.
> 
> I'm half way through writing a proper patch for this, but I haven't
> moved all the functionality in the evaluate command in to cuirass yet.
> 
> Does anyone have any opinions or ideas about this part of cuirass, or
> building things other than the packages in the Guix repository with it?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris



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