Hello Guix,
The other day, after being frustrated of build systems (auto-tools, meson, maven etc.), I wondered why doesn’t Guix which has such powerful tools within it (`guix build`, `guix pack` etc.) also not have a purely Guile-based build tool? After all, our goal is to make deployment, and building both more declarative and away from the all-too-familiar “dependency hell”.
I am not exactly sure how I want to go with this, but I want to extend (if needed) the capabilities of Guix, to allow the developer of a package to use it also to build the package effectively replacing existing build tools. Since we already have build-system, instead of executing make (or whatever other tool) commands from it, we could modify it to itself have all those things that a Makefile would have.
The developer would use Guile to declare their build config, I am again not sure what this might exactly look like, but can’t we have it such that we provide the developer with some tools to _declare_ a custom and package-specific build-system in Guile (just like our familiar gnu-build-system), but this is purely in Guile and executes whatever commands, path declarations and other interactions (such as calling gcc) directly from Guile and not by just calling `make`. I haven’t thought through this clearly, but even if this doesn’t work, the main idea I’d like to propose is to fully replace existing build-tools by making a new Guile build tool to work alongside Guix.
Ideally, once the developer has a build config ready, one can just wrap it up with a package definition in Guile, just like the ones we create to package something upstream. This package definition can then be used in `guix build -f package.scm` to result in a fully transactional building process that focuses not on getting out of dependency hell, but just declaring your config right. And all of this without having to learn yet another build tool that might disappear, and of course, without leaving the comfortable world of Lisp (Scheme).
I was indicated by others that such an idea has previously been conceievd among Guix developers themselves, namely as a GSoC proposal[0]. I couldn’t find if that has progressed towards anything, nor could find anything in the mailing list. I did see Pjotr volunteering to mentor for it, I’ve CC-ed them to see if they’re still interested in such a project. Meanwhile, I’d like input from other Guix core developers on what they think of this, and if they could provide me with some leads on where to go with this.
[0]:
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2024 Regards,