Re: guix is the guildhall that we always wanted!

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com> skribis:

> Concretly I would propose something like this in a package.scm in the
> git repo:
>
>   (use-modules (guildhall)) ; or whatever we call it
>   (import-guix-packages ((a "a")
>                          (b "b@5.2")))
>
>   (define foo
>     (guildhall-package
>       (name "foo")
>       (inputs
>        `(("a" ,a)
>          ("b" ,b)))
>       (git-url "https://github.com/foo/foo")
>       (home-page "https://github.com/foo/foo")
>       (synopsis "Foo is a thing")
>       (build-system simple-guile-build-system)
>       (description
>        "It's a thing")
>       (license license:expat)))
>
> I guess you would not want to load this file from the web service as it
> has arbitrary Scheme code inside it.  I could see solutions where only
> the end-user tool loads this file and exports data to the server, and
> the server creates an appropriate "normal" package definition using just
> the Guix API.  It can write those definitions out to disk.  It would
> export a progressing git repository of Guix package definitions.  As
> Guix API changes, that server could re-render those package
> descriptions.  Of course that only works in some limited cases.
> Otherwise you as a user could do this rendering process for packages you
> are developing.  Maybe it is a good thing to encourage nontrivial
> packages to go upstream to Guix.

Sounds like a reasonable approach.

BTW, there’s a simple actionable item here, which is to write that
‘guile-build-system’ in Guix.  Currently, for Scheme-only packages, we
often more or less copy/pasted stuff like this:

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/guile.scm#n733

If this were packaged in a ‘guile-build-system’¹, the barrier to
submitting Guile packages would already be lower.

Ludo’.

¹ See <https://gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Build-Systems.html>.