Re: Packages depending on (guix build syscalls)

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello Guix!
>
> (Resending to the right mailing list, oops!)
>
> Quite a few packages depend on (guix build syscalls), starting from
> ‘ant-bootstrap’ (since commit cded3a759356ff66b7df668bcdbdfa0daf96f4c5
> in 2018) up to GNOME-related packages such as ‘mutter’ (commit
> d1c2fe248a7a326189fb7dcae64a59ece96251ba a few months ago).
>
> It’s great that we can reuse this module in different contexts!  The
> downside is that the module evolves quite often, because it’s a
> foundation for Guix System and other things.  As a result, all these
> packages get rebuilt every time we change it.
>
> Maybe the only recommendation I would have is that we should make sure
> we really need it before having a package deep down the graph depend on
> it.  I wouldn’t want us to do ‘staging’ cycles when we need a change in
> (guix build syscalls).

As mentioned by others, I think merging more general purpose things from
Guix to Guile would be the best way forward.  Every time I write a
simple Guile script, I reach to Guix utils for simple things, which
ought to be in Guile proper.  Alternatively, there's at least 4 packages
depending on (guix build syscalls) for working around a bug where dead
processes are not reaped by PID1 in the Guix build container, causing
some test suites to fail [0].  If we were to fix it, we could remove
these workarounds.

[0]  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/30948

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim