Breaking the loop with php's composer

Breaking the loop with php's composer

[Mája Tomášek]

Hi,

Since I want to deploy roundcube on my guix machine, I was recently
looking into packaging composer (https://getcomposer.org/) which
is a dependency manager for PHP.

First it looked like it will be a simple task! Simply download the
installer. But! The installer was actually just a downloader for a .phar
archive. Why do you need a downloader for an archive in a repo?

So time to reverse engineer the archive. How to build it. Okay, now I
encountered a build script from
https://github.com/composer/getcomposer.org/blob/main/update.sh, but!
Another hickup. This script relies on composer! So you cannot build
composer without having composer! It's dotnet all over.

So I came to you, what should I do now? Here are my options:

1. contact the developers and hope they will help me
2. reverse engineer and build composer inside guix from scratch (as guix needs to install
dependencies outside of package managers and it'll still need to
circumvent the composer's download phase)
3. phar archives are actually acceptable in guix distribution, it
doesn't need to be built from source (i doubt this is the case)

Thank you all for any help.

With wishes of great wednesday,
Maya

Re: Breaking the loop with php's composer

[Joshua Branson]

Mája Tomášek <maya.tomasek@disroot.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Since I want to deploy roundcube on my guix machine, I was recently
> looking into packaging composer (https://getcomposer.org/) which
> is a dependency manager for PHP.
>
> First it looked like it will be a simple task! Simply download the
> installer. But! The installer was actually just a downloader for a .phar
> archive. Why do you need a downloader for an archive in a repo?
>
> So time to reverse engineer the archive. How to build it. Okay, now I
> encountered a build script from
> https://github.com/composer/getcomposer.org/blob/main/update.sh, but!
> Another hickup. This script relies on composer! So you cannot build
> composer without having composer! It's dotnet all over.
>
> So I came to you, what should I do now? Here are my options:
>
> 1. contact the developers and hope they will help me

Certainly give that a try!

> 2. reverse engineer and build composer inside guix from scratch (as guix needs to install
> dependencies outside of package managers and it'll still need to
> circumvent the composer's download phase)

You could always use git to travel back in composer's time, to a time
when composer did not use compuser to build itself.  I think that is how
to package jquery currently.  We just use a really old makefile and have
an outdated jquery package.

> 3. phar archives are actually acceptable in guix distribution, it
> doesn't need to be built from source (i doubt this is the case)

You are correct.  Guix perfers that we build everything from source.

Best of luck!
>
> Thank you all for any help.
>
> With wishes of great wednesday,
> Maya

Re: Breaking the loop with php's composer

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Mája,

Mája Tomášek <maya.tomasek@disroot.org> skribis:

> Since I want to deploy roundcube on my guix machine, I was recently
> looking into packaging composer (https://getcomposer.org/) which
> is a dependency manager for PHP.

Julien (Cc’d) has a Composer patch set, including an importer, that’s
pretty much ready:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/42338

For some reason this hasn’t been pushed yet, but maybe you call tell
Julien how much you’d like to have it and it’ll happen.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.