Re: Blog: Guix packaging tutorial

[Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz>]

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> https://gitlab.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/HACKING.org

Wow, this is a fantastic document!  Is it mentioned anywhere?  I wish I had
known about this before.  I guess you've done most of the work already.
I'll make sure to mention your work and credit you in the blog article.

I could spot some mistakes:

- it's "%outputs" with and "s", not "%output".

- "–no-substites".

Ricardo has a very good point.  Initially I did not think of orienting the blog
towards contributing to upstream, and I think you are right, it's something very
important we should do, especially considering that Guix is one of the very
distributions that welcomes user contributions regardless of their "status".

On the other hand, I can also see a different population of users, those who
simply don't intend to contribute for whatever reasons (think the "fear of the
first commitment" when newborn hackers send their first patch).  Those users
might get a feeling that Guix is not "hackable for their own purposes" if they
can't define a package for their own private use.

My suggestion is to quickly mention GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH, insist on contributing
upstream and underline the friction that results from moving from
GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH to upstream, as Ricardo pointed out.

Complex packages and trivial build system: I think a tutorial is not so useful
if it only covers the basics that many users can figure out by themselves.  An
advanced tutorial covering the parts that are hard to learn alone would be more
than welcome in my opinion.
In my personal experience, I got started with "inxi" which uses the trivial
build system, and it was _very hard_, even while I could get a grasp of the
gnu-build-system.

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:
> A second advanced hacking tutorial could discuss more advanced
> features.

I also agree with your point that starting off with complex packaging could
scare people away.  So my suggestion is as follows:

- Part 1: basics + gnu-build-system + importers
- Part 2: trivial-build-system + debug and REPL interaction.

What do you think?

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:
> You could have a look at the slides of a talk I gave at GHM 2013 in the
> "maintenance" git repo, inside the talks/ghm-2013/andreas directory.
> Some things are outdated (we did not have the macros to manipulate build
> phases yet).

Will have a look, thanks!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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