Re: Building hexyl (a rust app) without cargo, with antioxidant-build-system

[raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net>]

On Mon, 30 May 2022 11:23:21 +0300
Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 02, 2022 at 05:18:55PM +0200, Maxime Devos wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > antioxidant-build-system can now be used for some ‘real’ software
> > -- it compiles 'hexyl'.  To test, download
> > <https://notabug.org/maximed/cargoless-rust-experiments> (commit:
> > d09fd93750ac6d77e0c85623286b45cf5c3b055b) and run
> > "guix build -L . -f guix.scm" and then
> > 
> > $ cat guix.scm | /gnu/store/[...]-hexyl-0.8.0/bin/hexyl  
> > > lots of coloured hex output  
> > 
> > Some features of antioxidant-build-system:
> > 
> >   * no copying source code of dependencies
> >   * no compiling dependencies again -- old artifacts are reused
> >   * all dependencies use the usual package input system
> >     (native-inputs, inputs, propagated-inputs)
> > 
> > Limitations:
> > 
> >   * no support for linking to arbitrary shared libraries yet
> >     (only rust deps)
> >   * makes a few assumptions on the source layout (can be fixed
> >     by using more info from Cargo.toml)
> >   * no tests
> >   * no cross-compilation yet
> >   * no shared libraries (just replacing 'rlib' by 'dylib' causes
> > problems)
> >   * code is a bit messy
> >   * no cdylib yet (probably needed for librsvg)  
> 
> Something that might help with that would be to also include the
> source of the crate somewhere in the output. Then at the worst we
> could just put the rust inputs of librsvg as regular inputs and let
> librsvg do its own special build thing. We'd then still keep the
> build dependency tree you've got working.
> 
> 

Maybe put the source in an extra output, not the main "out" one.
Splitting them up later for size reduction will be much more difficult
than doing this from the get-go.