Re: guix is the guildhall that we always wanted!

[Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche@hypermove.net>]

Héllo wingo!

On 2017-03-16 19:25, Andy Wingo wrote:
> Hi all!
> 

[...]

> But it turns out that we can use the same strategy to distribute
> reproducible binaries for any package that Guix includes.  Notably, if
> you run:
> 
>   guix pack -S /opt/guile-fibers-1.0.0=/ guile-next guile-fibers
> glibc-utf8-locales
> 
> Then what you get is a tarball that has Guile, Fibers, and everything
> they depend on.  It's safe to extract in / because it only adds files 
> to
> /gnu/store, and then it adds a symlink for /opt/guile-fibers-1.0.0.
> 

cf. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/doc/guix.texi#n2392

> 
> So:
> 
>   * local development using packaged libraries: check.
>   * distribution of your work to people without $package-manager: 
> check.
>   * easy addition of your code to a common NPM-like registry: ?
> 
> For this last bit, we have two options.  One is to add your package to
> Guix.  It's relatively easy; here's what I added for Fibers:
> 
>     (define-public guile-fibers
>       (package
>         (name "guile-fibers")
>         (version "1.0.0")
>         (source (origin
>                   (method url-fetch)
>                   (uri (string-append 
> "https://wingolog.org/pub/fibers/fibers-"
>                                       version ".tar.gz"))
>                   (sha256
>                    (base32
>                     
> "0vjkg72ghgdgphzbjz9ig8al8271rq8974viknb2r1rg4lz92ld0"))))
>         (build-system gnu-build-system)
>         (native-inputs
>          `(("texinfo" ,texinfo)
>            ("pkg-config" ,pkg-config)))
>         (inputs
>          `(("guile" ,guile-next)))
>         (synopsis "Lightweight concurrency facility for Guile")
>         (description
>          "Fibers is a Guile library that implements a a lightweight 
> concurrency
>     facility, inspired by systems like Concurrent ML, Go, and Erlang.
> A fiber is
>     like a \"goroutine\" from the Go language: a lightweight 
> thread-like
>     abstraction.  Systems built with Fibers can scale up to millions
> of concurrent
>     fibers, tens of thousands of concurrent socket connections, and
> many parallel
>     cores.  The Fibers library also provides Concurrent ML-like 
> channels for
>     communication between fibers.
> 
>     Note that Fibers makes use of some Guile 2.1/2.2-specific features 
> and
>     is not available for Guile 2.0.")
>         (home-page "https://github.com/wingo/fibers")
>         (license license:lgpl3+)))
> 
> OK, so this uses gnu-build-system, which requires a tarball; we need to
> extend this to have a "guile-build-system" for modules that are just
> Scheme, in which we just "guild compile" everything.  That way you can
> have a repo on gitlab or whatever and you just specify the URL and the
> revision and you are done.  I don't know if we can get around 
> specifying
> the sha256 when we specify the git revision; probably not a good idea 
> in
> light of the SHA1 breakage.  Anyway, that's a thing.
> 
> But while getting your package into guix is easier than you think, it's
> not automatic.  I think there's room for a middle ground that's a bit
> more decentralized than Guix, but more centralized than people using
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH to add random directories of Guix package files.

Ok, I like the idea!

> 
> So!  My proposal for this new "guildhall" would be:
> 
>     1. a web service
> 

What would be the cli interface associated with that web service?
Some thing like the following will do:

   $ guildhall register

     Register a package against the guildhall repository.
     You must have a package.scm in the current working
     directory that follows package specification of guix.
     http://link/to/guix/doc/that/I/dont/know

Does it require login/password?

That is all I can think of.

>     2. on which users registers projects
> 
>     3. a project is a name + a git repository with a /package.scm file

We can have that using guile-git: current commit + remote origin.

>     4. the package.scm contains Guix package definitions for that 
> project
> 
>     5. the web service administers a git repository collecting those
>        packages
>        - without any hydra.gnu.org overhead

What do you mean, by no hydra.gnu.org overhead? Where are
done the 'guix pack' command?

>        - without any manual checks
>        - in a form that you can just check out once and add to 
> GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH
> 

Ok, the 'guix pack' can be done by the maintainer and
'guix register' does upload the lz file to guildhall
website.

>     6. adding a new tag to a project's git repo of the form vX makes a
>        release X and updates the guildhall package
>        - it could be the web service has to poll git repos
>        - or maybe you have to invoke some command to update guildhall

It's painful to have to "watch" git repositories, except if the git
repository is a remote of the develloper's git. Basically it requires
a manual intervention from the maintainer. Otherwise, guildhall website
need to pull regularly all git repositories.

>     7. probably we need to steal many ideas from npm.org

I think about their dependency resolution algorithm. I think
civodul should chime in.


> You might ask, why is this better than the current guildhall?  It does
> exist after all.  I respond in the following way:
> 

[...]

> 
> But!  Who is going to build the guildhall v2.2? :-)
> 

idk ;)

I have also a question, for guix community:

What do you think of guix web, how one can improve it.
The idea I have behind that question, is that maybe we
should target to create a web ui for guix to improve
guile experience.


Amirouche ~ amz3 ~ http://hyperdev.fr