Christina O'Donnell <cdo@mutix.org> writes:

Hi guix and guixesses,

I'm still enjoying my guix machine crashing every other week despite changing all the software and half the hardware. So I'm trying to get kdump
working so I can get to the real reason behind it. However I see that kdump-tools haven't been packaged yet. I see this as an opportunity for me to
contribute to Guix, but it'll be my first time.

- How interested would people be in me packaging kdump and related tools?

More debugging tools (and docs!) are always welcome IMHO.

- Is there a reason why it's not there already?

- Has it been tried before?

Searching the mailing lists doesn't turn up much, so I assume no one has
tried it:
https://yhetil.org/guix/?q=kdump

The scope seems to be around 3-4 packages and a system service. Does that sound about right or could there be more I'm missing?

On Debian there's:

crash/testing,now 8.0.2-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  kernel debugging utility, allowing gdb like syntax

kdump-tools/testing,now 1:1.8.1 amd64 [installed]
  scripts and tools for automating kdump (Linux crash dumps)

libkdumpfile-dev/testing 0.5.1-1 amd64
  libkdumpfile development libraries and header files

libkdumpfile-doc/testing,testing 0.5.1-1 all
  Kernel coredump file access (documentation)

libkdumpfile10/testing 0.5.1-1 amd64
  Kernel coredump file access

python3-libkdumpfile/testing 0.5.1-1 amd64
  Python bindings for libkdumpfile

I'd want to package all of these except the python bindings. I see that kexec-tools is already in guix which is good!

Is this a sensible direction?

Kind regards,
 - Christina

I'd say go for it!  If they are mostly written in C then you probably
don't have to package a lot of transitive dependencies.  Looking in
gnu/packages/linux.scm could be a good starting point for packaging
kernel related tools.

Ah I must have missed this in my inbox. Thanks for the feedback! I'll have a go at this once some more time appears in my day.