Re: Guix now in Debian experimental!

[Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

This!  Is!  Awesome!

I think Guix in Debian could be huge and help both massively.  Well,
I've said so more than once in the past.  I believe it!  What's easy to
package in one tends to be easy to package in the other.  Just imagine
if we encouraged more developers using Debian as their host OS to use
"guix environment" (or eventually "guix shell") for their development
environments instead of one million incompatible language package
managers!

Vagrant Cascadian writes:

> It's been a long haul getting all the build dependencies of guix into
> Debian, but it has finally paid off:
>
>    https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/guix
>
> So now you can install guix from Debian's experimental distribution!
>
> It is not well tested, in fact, I had to disable many tests, because in
> Debian it is a policy violation to download from the network during a
> build, but unlike guix, the policy is not necessarily enforced in any
> technical way!
>
> Many of the tests call out to the network in one way or another... So,
> this lead to:
>
>   Support GUIX_DISABLE_NETWORK_TESTS environment variable
>   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/44491
>
> Though I since learned about RES_OPTIONS=attempts:0 to disable name
> resolution in glibc instead, still working on refactoring tests/*.sh to
> make use of some common functions.
>
>
> There are many tests that make use of bootstrap binaries which attempt
> to download them during running the tests, despite networking not being
> available. I have patched these tests to also not run when the network
> is unreachable:
>
>   https://salsa.debian.org/debian/guix/-/tree/debian/devel/debian/patches
>
> My guess is these bootstrap binaries are available as inputs during the
> guix package builds of guix?
>
>
> I've also patched out a few tests that seemed non-deterministic, and a
> few that were simply inscrutible as to why they failed. Probably need to
> file bugs about those at some point... :)
>
>
> I also switched the packages to only run the tests in series, just in
> case parallelism was triggering issues with the tests:
>
>   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/21097
>
>
> In all, this ends up disabling about 200 out of 1100 tests in the Debian
> packages. I will explore another option to run those tests outside of
> the build, where network can be used, against the installed package
> using:
>
>   https://ci.debian.net
>
>
> It actually builds on both amd64 and i386 with some of the above
> mentioned tests disabled:
>
>   https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=guix&suite=experimental
>
> On armhf (ARMv7), it successfully built, but failed some test suites
> that passed on amd64/i386.
>
> On armel (ARMv4t?), where it probably shouldn't even attempt to build,
> it failed in the same way it failed on armhf...
>
> On arm64, guile-gnutls isn't available for guile-3.0, so it cannot
> build:
>
>   https://bugs.debian.org/966714
>
> An alternative would be to build guix against guile-2.2, which has
> guile-gnutls, although I did manage to find... more test suite failures
> on guile-2.2 (tests/lint.scm), including one which seemed to run
> indefinitely(tests/swh.scm), an infinitely thorough test!
>
> If the guile-gnutls issues do not get sorted out soon, building against
> guile-2.2 is a plausible backup plan for getting guix 1.2 into the next
> Debian release (speculated to be released mid 2021)...
>
>
> For other architectures, it would require considerably more courage,
> though there has been work on a few of those architectures in guix
> recently (e.g. hurd-i386, mips64el, powerpc, ppc64, ppc64el, and even
> talk of riscv64).  Would it be interesting to run guix on one of the
> more exotic architectures, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD? :)
>
>
> Well, thanks for reading the status update from your entirely unofficial
> Debian-Guix or Guix-Debian ambassador.
>
>
> live well,
>   vagrant