Re: Help needed packaging rust-cbindgen, a dependency of IceCat 68

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 11:19:18AM +0200, Jonathan Brielmaier wrote:
> On 22.10.19 08:23, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> > Hello fellow Guix,
> >
> > I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that thanks to the
> > heroic efforts of Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>, a recently appointed
> > co-maintainer of GNU IceCat, there now exists a preliminary version of
> > IceCat 68 that builds successfully and works on Trisquel.
> >
> > The bad news is that IceCat 68 has a new dependency: rust-cbindgen,
> > which itself depends on *245* other Rust libraries that are not yet
> > packaged for Guix.
> >
> > I'm very glad for "guix import crate -r", which was able to enumerate
> > this list of dependencies for me, and to auto-generate ~267 kilobytes of
> > new package definitions, but unfortunately it was only able to deduce
> > the license for about half of those.  131 out of 245 of these new
> > package definitions have (license #f).  I'm not sure what's up with
> > that, but it might be necessary to manually determine the licenses of
> > these.
> >
> > Mozilla is scheduled to release Firefox 68.2 ESR today, along with a
> > security advisory describing flaws in previous versions of Firefox which
> > are fixed in 68.2.  Many of these security flaws will affect IceCat 60,
> > but the 60 ESR branch is no longer supported upstream.  This means that
> > we need to get IceCat 68 packaged ASAP.
> >
> > There are other urgent matters demanding my attention right now, so I
> > cannot afford to do all of this work myself.  I can take care of
> > upgrading and debugging the IceCat 68 package itself -- I already have a
> > preliminary patch capable of generating the source tarball -- but I need
> > help packaging rust-cbindgen and its 245 dependencies.
> >
> > Who's willing to help?  To get started: "guix import crate -r cbindgen".
> 
> Efraim made a proposal to overhaul the cargo-build-system. I think this
> could be pretty interesting for cbindgen.
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-10/msg00180.html
> 
> I'm interested in a proper solution here, as Thunderbird needs also
> cbindgen to build. Reminds me that I should share the state of my
> Thunderbird "package"...

Indeed. The short version is to basically treat each of the crates more
like the test data, something that gets downloaded but not built
independently. Then throw everything into the build system similar to
now, but with more manual dependency resolution, and work with it that
way. I have one that I tested successfully that I can make shorter but
can't share. Throwing together something quickly for this should
probably only take an hour or two.

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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