Re: Help needed packaging rust-cbindgen, a dependency of IceCat 68

[Jonathan Brielmaier <jonathan.brielmaier@web.de>]

On 22.10.19 08:23, Mark H Weaver wrote:
> Hello fellow Guix,
>
> I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that thanks to the
> heroic efforts of Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>, a recently appointed
> co-maintainer of GNU IceCat, there now exists a preliminary version of
> IceCat 68 that builds successfully and works on Trisquel.
>
> The bad news is that IceCat 68 has a new dependency: rust-cbindgen,
> which itself depends on *245* other Rust libraries that are not yet
> packaged for Guix.
>
> I'm very glad for "guix import crate -r", which was able to enumerate
> this list of dependencies for me, and to auto-generate ~267 kilobytes of
> new package definitions, but unfortunately it was only able to deduce
> the license for about half of those.  131 out of 245 of these new
> package definitions have (license #f).  I'm not sure what's up with
> that, but it might be necessary to manually determine the licenses of
> these.
>
> Mozilla is scheduled to release Firefox 68.2 ESR today, along with a
> security advisory describing flaws in previous versions of Firefox which
> are fixed in 68.2.  Many of these security flaws will affect IceCat 60,
> but the 60 ESR branch is no longer supported upstream.  This means that
> we need to get IceCat 68 packaged ASAP.
>
> There are other urgent matters demanding my attention right now, so I
> cannot afford to do all of this work myself.  I can take care of
> upgrading and debugging the IceCat 68 package itself -- I already have a
> preliminary patch capable of generating the source tarball -- but I need
> help packaging rust-cbindgen and its 245 dependencies.
>
> Who's willing to help?  To get started: "guix import crate -r cbindgen".

Efraim made a proposal to overhaul the cargo-build-system. I think this
could be pretty interesting for cbindgen.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-10/msg00180.html

I'm interested in a proper solution here, as Thunderbird needs also
cbindgen to build. Reminds me that I should share the state of my
Thunderbird "package"...