Re: Guix-based build tool

[julien lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 2018-04-09 17:30, ludo@gnu.org a écrit :
> Hello!
> 
> Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:
> 
>> Indeed, I love working with Guix and developing with Guix. Guix takes
>> care of my deployment and configuration requirements.
>> 
>> I have written some time in the past that with Guix you don't need
>> autotools. The main thing autotools solve is configuring the build for
>> an environment. At the same time, with Guix you get a predictable
>> environment, so a make file (or similar) suffices. It is what I do in
>> all my development projects - I don't use autotools to develop and
>> deploy them. It greatly simplifies my existence :). Indeed, I have
>> never liked autotools (essentially a nasty hack) and only used them
>> before Nix/Guix. So, my approach is the same as yours :)
> 
> +1!
> 
> If we could provide tooling with an abstraction level close to that of 
> a
> makefile, that’d help a lot.

I don't really agree mixing a package manager and a build tool is a
good idea. Sure, it helps a lot because they both solve the same kind
of problem and I certainly see what advantage it would have, but so do
maven devs. They mixed a package manager and a build system together.
It became the official way to build many packages, including its own
dependencies. As a result, it became a total mess to build maven from
scratch. So if someone wants to build a package whose only build
system is guix but can't use guix for some reason (maybe it wasn't
ported to their platform?) will just cry and hate us.

> 
> Actually, just like we have ‘emacs-build-system’, we could very much 
> add
> ‘guile-build-system’ for simple Guile packages that don’t need/use
> Autoconf & co.

That's more reasonable though :)

> 
> ‘guile-build-system’ would automatically run ‘guild compile’,
> ‘makeinfo’, etc. pretty much like we do here:
> 
>   
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/guile.scm#n870
> 
> Once we have that, developers of Guile packages can simply drop a
> ‘.guix’ file in their project and use it with ‘guix environment’, ‘guix
> build’, and ‘guix package’.
> 
> That’s coarser-grain than a makefile, of course, but would be a good
> first step to providing tooling for people working on Guile code.
> 
> Any takers for ‘guile-build-system’?
> 
> 
> A next step could be to add a tool that understands a syntax like that
> of the guildhall, which gets us closer to the makefile/Makefile.am 
> level
> of abstraction:
> 
>   https://github.com/ijp/guildhall/blob/master/docs/packaging.texi#L121
> 
> Ludo’.