"Cross"-Building for foreign ditros

"Cross"-Building for foreign ditros

[Hartmut Goebel]

Hallo,

I would like to use Guix to set up a reproducible build environment for
building packages for a foreign distribution. Of course, this would not
use the guix build systems, but the foreign distro*s tools - which
itself should come from Guix.

For example: Using /gnu/store/…/bin/gcc and /gnu/store/…/bin/rpm for
building RPM packages for Fedora.

Did anybody already work in this areas or has any ideas?

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |

Re: "Cross"-Building for foreign ditros

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> skribis:

> I would like to use Guix to set up a reproducible build environment for
> building packages for a foreign distribution. Of course, this would not
> use the guix build systems, but the foreign distro*s tools - which
> itself should come from Guix.
>
> For example: Using /gnu/store/…/bin/gcc and /gnu/store/…/bin/rpm for
> building RPM packages for Fedora.

To build RPM packages for Fedora, you really need to build within Fedora
so that the package you build is known to work with the Fedora packages
it depends on.

Nixpkgs has tools to do that:

  https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/build-support/vm

Essentially you would boot a VM of that distro, but using our own kernel
and initrd; the initrd would spawn something like marionette to
instrument the system.  From there, you would run the package build
code, but attempting to use, for instance, their GCC and libraries
instead of ours.

HTH!

Ludo’.